The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir - Hardcover

Reading more like a new form of poetry than a biography, The Circle of Hanh is a mesmerizing blend of past and present, of actual events and never-expressed feelings and memories about those events. Beginning with the present and the author's adoption process of a Vietnamese orphan, the story zaps suddenly back to Weigl's childhood and then moves slowly onward--through toddler accidents, adolescent gropings, and the painful return to America after fighting in Vietnam. Chronological order is not important here: the emotions spurred by an occurrence in adulthood will lead in to a chapter about his grandfather; returning from war, he describes a Christmas from his childhood. This blended style, ignoring the traditional flow of time, is fascinating to read and difficult to put down. The narrative becomes clearer when Weigl is writing specifically about the adoption, and you share everything from visa problems to a kidney stone with the author during his journey to Hanoi. This is also the happiest part of the book, where Weigl's commitment to his new daughter comes through clearly, as does his understanding of Vietnamese language and culture (he has assisted in the translation of several books of Vietnamese poetry in recent years). A personally revealing book, The Circle of Hanh ends with a combination of emotions present throughout the story--joy and hope, nostalgia and regret--all blended into Weigl's beautiful prose. --Jill Lightner

The Vietnam War remains a haunting subtext for acclaimed poet Weigl (Song of Napalm, etc.), whose 1967 induction into the U.S. Army and year in Vietnam led to his passion for that country's poetry and culture. In this eager but uneven memoir, Weigl recounts his life storyAfrom his hard-bitten childhood in Lorain, Ohio, to a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his adopted daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. Weigl's reverence for storytelling, forged the day a Red Cross worker flung Crime and Punishment at him as he lay sick at a base camp in An Khe, serves as a touchstone throughout this book; he seeks salvation by way of "the great chain of stories." Most memorable are stories from his Zagreb-born grandfather, who oversaw the birth of his first child (at the hands of a drunken doctor hastily pulled away from a late-night card game at the Slovak Club) by holding a gun to the doctor's head to ensure the child's safe delivery. But Weigl's own stories seem to squirm away just as he grasps their elemental truth, leaving raw, underworked passages in their stead. As he tries to mediate the silences and shames that pockmark his life, he seems to find not salvation but deepening realms of pain: "I had done so much traveling in the world of hurt that had been my life," he writes, "that the boundaries we need in order to be human had vanished." (Apr.)
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