Review: How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

reviewed by Sonya Lara 

How to Pronounce Knife

Short stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Little, Brown and Company, April 2020.

$26.00; 192pp.

ISBN: 978-0-316-42213-0

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa is not only a collection of stories, but a culmination of lives stripped bare for the naked eye. Unrelenting in her mastery of zoomed-in detail, Thammavongsa propels readers into the raw depths of what it means to love, desire, dream, ache, and grieve through stories that challenge and push against the problematic American standard of beauty, the dangers of assimilation, and the damaging effects of racism. Using repetition to magnify and shrink her characters’ personal complexities and intimate hopes, Thammavongsa both invites readers in and shuts them out of the vulnerable worlds found within each piece. At 192 pages, the fourteen stories in How to Pronounce Knife are sharp, quick, and anchored in necessity.

Opening the collection with the short story “How to Pronounce Knife,” Thammavongsa juxtaposes standard English pronunciations with family loyalty. Centering the piece around a daughter of Laotian immigrants, Joy recounts her experience of navigating a classroom where questioning the standard pronunciation of English is not tolerated. After asking her father how to pronounce the word “knife” at home one night, Joy is ridiculed for her mispronunciation the next day by “a yellow-haired girl in the class.” Unlike what her father taught her, Joy learns that the letter “k” in “knife” is actually silent. Towards the end of the story, Thammavongsa writes:

…………Later that night, the child looks over at her father during dinner. How he picks up each
…………grain of rice with his chopsticks, not dropping a single one. How he eats, clearing away
…………everything in his bowl. How small and shrunken he seems.

It is in these moments that Thammavongsa balances the act of placing the narrator outside of their own body while magnifying the details of their surroundings. Using repetition, Thammavongsa stacks Joy’s observations to illustrate the divisive world she’s been thrown into. Each repeated “how” statement further distances Joy from her father and both suppresses and exposes Joy’s conflict with informing him that his mispronunciation of “knife” cost her the “red yoyo” reward, leaving her the only student in the class to never obtain a prize. Thammavongsa’s repetition simultaneously builds and dismantles tension behind reflection and observation while the stripped-down details draw attention to Joy’s home life and family, “what else [her father] doesn’t know,” and what else she “would have to find out for herself.”

In the short story “Paris,” Thammavongsa interrogates women’s success not through the productivity of their work, but by the shapes and sizes of their noses. While the narrator Red and other women scrape the feathers off of chickens in a chicken plant, they all dream of saving enough money for nose jobs that would land them a position in the front office. Each day, women compare their bodies to one another and look to the white women in the front office as the pinnacle of beauty. Uncomfortable with her body, Red fights against Somboun’s praise and attention, and refuses to recognize her Laotian features as beautiful. Somboun and Red grapple with their working relationship and cultural similarities through the names they choose to call each other. While Somboun calls Red “Dang,” which means red in Lao, Red calls Somboun “Sam,” his American name.

Thammavongsa pins bodies and names against one another in a wrestling of identity and illustrates the cultural eradication of assimilation. The kinship of a mutual language is discarded for the possibility of white acceptance and potential of reaching Hollywood’s idea of standardized beauty. Red not only wants her boss Tommy to admire her the way he does other women with thin noses, but she also craves the acceptance and seemingly perfect life of Tommy’s beautiful wife, Nicole. Red can’t help but wonder if she did not have a flat nose, but “a thin nose that stuck out from her face and pointed upward,” if she too would receive male attention, lavish gifts, and expensive trips to Paris, France for Valentine’s Day. By zooming in on women’s noses, Thammavongsa attempts to draw readers’ eyes to the most humane part of the body—the face. Focusing on the character’s facial features, she demonstrates the damage behind the idea that women are objects that can be easily “fixed” and the price of surgically altering one’s very own subjectivity. Red’s highly problematic work environment highlights the destructive impact of racism and idolized American beauty and calls attention to the potential life-long damage behind assimilation.

Throughout How to Pronounce Knife, Thammavongsa effortlessly captures the subtle differences that sound and language has on identity, place, and relationships. Deliberately placing the third, fourth, and fifth stories directly after one another, Thammavongsa compares the sound and meaning of laughter in people’s lives. In “Slingshot,” the narrator, an older woman, pursues a physical relationship with a younger man and comments on how their laughter and jokes allows them to “hide how [they] feel and mean what [they] say at the same time.” The characters’ laughter becomes an intimate invitation for a confession hidden inside a joke. Much like “Slingshot,” the radio host’s laughter in “Randy Travis” is what draws the narrator’s mother to listen to a country radio station every day and eventually fall in love with Randy Travis. For the mother, “a laugh, in any language, was a laugh. The radio host’s laugh was gentle and private and welcoming.” Again, readers see laughter as a gateway to companionship, a breaking of isolation. However, in “Mani Pedi,” a brother and sister,

…………[H]ear a family. . . giggling—young and fragile and innocent. It was the kind of giggling
…………they themselves did as kids. Now, that kind of giggle seemed foolish for them to do. It
…………was like a far distant thing, a thing that happened only to other people. All they could do
…………now was be close to it and remain out of sight.

After arguing about the dangers of getting caught up in dreams, the siblings use giggling as a reminder of the loss of hope. Seamlessly, Thammavongsa complicates both the act and sound of laughter as a means of exposing a character’s desire and confliction all at once.

Thammavongsa’s other stories further explore what it means to live, what it means to survive, and what it means to dream. Thammavongsa is an author that leaves readers believing that language, societal norms and behaviors, and identities are meant to be pushed, challenged, and questioned. In Thammavongsa’s future collection, I look forward to heartier stories that force readers to stay with characters longer. While the brevity of the stories within the debut are breathtaking, heartbreaking, and reflective, I want to spend more time with the characters’ shortcomings and strengths, break out of the one room or one place that most of the characters live in, and read the characters’ complications in larger settings and dive deeper into their intimate lives. How to Pronounce Knife is a brilliant collection of stories that will make its way into the hands, and hearts, of readers again and again.

Sonya Lara served as the Associate Fiction Editor for The Madison Review at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received her BA in English-Creative Writing. Currently, she is the Co-Founder, Poetry Editor, and Social Media Manager for Rare Byrd Review; an Editor-at-Large for Cleaver Magazine; and an MFA poetry candidate at Virginia Tech. In 2019, she was the Managing Editor for the minnesota review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Voices, Wisconsin’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, Trestle Ties, Heavy Feather Review, ENTROPY, Homology Lit, and AGNI. For more information, visit www.sonyalara.com.