PRUNING TREES

Fabien Truong

(Payot-Rivages, 208 pages, 2021)

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

Vietnam and New Caledonia: two unusual destinations for a school trip. Even more so when the point of departure is not a posh Parisian high school but the Lycée Paul Eluard, in the northern working-class suburb of Saint-Denis, home to generations of immigrant families. Earlier in his career, Fabien Truong taught at the Lycée Paul Eluard, and his time spent there stayed with him. When Pierre, the veteran and visionary teacher behind the school trips, asks him to be a chaperone and join in this unusual venture, he accepts. It will also be the occasion for Truong, whose father is Vietnamese, to visit the land of his grandparents. In Pruning Trees, the children of immigrants find themselves representing metropolitan France, and it is through their eyes that France’s colonial past and its ongoing legacy are revisited in a wholly original, humorous, and poignant way.

We follow Zora, Idriss, Toufik, Fahred, Lison, and others as they step foot into an airplane, contend with strange food, and enjoy the rare leisure of an ocean swim, many for the first time. In New Caledonia they attend a fancy party at the Noumea residence of the High Commissioner of the Republic; they plant kauri trees, and dialogue with Kanak independentists. In Vietnam, they roam through the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City and the Viet Cong Cu Chi tunnels.

In his previous academic work, Truong was praised for his thoughtful and well-crafted ethnography. Pruning Trees, his first effort at literary narrative, exhibits the same dedication to listening and observing. He relates and evokes his own experience as he returns to the land of his ancestors after many years. Most striking, the text is permeated, at times taken over, by the words of the students in an unmediated fashion that invites the reader to pause, and in their turn pay close attention. The result is an immersive and richly textured account that veers off the usual sociological and predictable narratives of the youth of the banlieues.

Fabien Truong is a sociologist and author of Radicalized Loyalties: Becoming Muslim in the West (Polity, 2018), as well as Jeunesses françaises. Bac + 5 made in banlieue (La Découverte, 2015) and Des capuches et des hommes (Buchet-Chastel, 2013).