1963 Linda Lê was born in Dalat, Saigon to a French mother and a Vietnamese father who was an engineer.

1968 Due to an incursion by North Vietnamese troups into South Vietnam, her family was forced to relocate. The exodus was traumatic, with the young Lê encountering corpses on route. Although Lê rejects the reading of a direct ‘parallélisme’ between the worlds depicted in her texts and mid twentieth-century Vietnam 1, she has also stated that she feels that Vietnam itself is like a dead body carried around inside her, ‘J'ai l'impression de porter en moi un corps mort. C'est sûrement le Vietnam que je porte comme un enfant mort’.2 Visions of dead and dying bodies, often with severed heads or limbs or in states of decomposition haunt Lê’s writing and the imaginations and nightmares of her narrators. Nevertheless, such trauma is not depicted merely in the pursuit of representing Vietnam itself. It has wider resonances. As Jack A. Yeager notes, ‘Lê blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, French and Vietnamese, the personal and the plural’.3

1969 The family moved to Saigon. Lê has identified this time as one in which her sense of security was ruptured. The external threat was complicated by a breakdown in the relationship between her parents, ‘[t]out a basculé lorsque nous nous sommes installés à Saigon. Je suis passée du paradis enfantin à l'enfer. J'avais six ans, la ville était une fournaise et les rapports entre mes parents s'étaient profondément dégradés. A partir de ce moment a commencé la chute, l'impression d'être damnée’.4

In Saigon Lê started to study at the French lycée. She spoke French at home and had access to her Francophone mother’s library as well as the school library. She claims to have read Balzac and Hugo avidly and to have known that she would become a writer.5 She has also reported being drawn to harsh subject matter in texts nominally directed at children, relishing fairy tales such as that of the little match girl who freezes to death. She states ‘J'éprouve une attirance pour les êtres funestes’.6 She reprised a horrific fairytale style in some of her own texts, particularly in Lettre morte (1999) in which the narrator’s lover ‘Morgue’ metamorphoses in her dreams into a bird of prey and a vengeful swordbearer. Despite being drawn to dark reading material, Lê also presents the acts of reading and writing as a type of ‘salvation’. This view is underscored in Calomnies (1993) in which reading is presented as a type of refuge from a stressful society and writing as a means, albeit an imperfect one, by which the 'mad' and marginalized might gain a voice. Lê has professed that she only once doubted literature’s capacity to ‘sauver celui qui s'en approche’ and that was after her father’s death and her subsequent breakdown.7 Even in extremis, however, she eventually found authors that she felt spoke to her situation, naming Tolstoy in particular as one she felt had attempted to reconstitute his life through writing, in the face of personal crisis.8

1975 Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troups.

1977 Lê, her mother and three sisters left Saigon for France. Lê transferred to a lycée in Le Havre, where a literature teacher introduced her to the works of Proust. Her non-French-speaking father remained behind in Vietnam. Although he survived the occupation of Saigon and lived the best part of another two decades, the motif of the abandoned father figure occurs in many of her novels. The disturbed narrator of Voix (1998), for example, has recurring visions of her dead father, including one in which he appears in a cloak of flames next to her bed, demanding ‘Pourquoi ne m’as tu pas sauvé?’9

1977-1981 Lê transferred to a lycée in Le Havre, where she found a sympathetic Literature teacher who introduced her to the works of Proust. Encouraged by her teacher, she applied to the lycée Henri IV in Paris and was accepted in 1981. From there she went on to study at the Sorbonne.

In the 1980s Lê published her earliest works in quick succession - Un si tendre vampire (1987), Fuir (1988) and Solo (1989). Lê does not regard these novels as equal in standard to later work and they do not always appear in formal bibliographies. To support herself she worked as a preface editor for Hachette. Her preface writing has been published in the anthology Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999).

In the early 1990s Lê began to establish herself as a more mature writer, coming to greater public attention when Juilliard published Les Évangiles du crime to critical acclaim in 1992. Mimicking the form of four gospels, the text consists of four stories that explore characters’ deaths and suicides within wider power relations.

1993 Lê moved to Christian Bourgois Éditeur, starting a fruitful publishing relationship that has lasted to date.

1995 Lê's beloved father died as he was preparing to come to France for his first visit. The two had carried on an intense correspondence but had not seen each other for nearly twenty years. Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time, for his funeral. After his death, Lê reported suffering ‘d'hallucinations, de pensées suicidaires, de conduites paranoïaques’. She had lost not only a father but the man she claimed was her ‘lecteur ideal’, leaving her in ‘[un]monde sans dieu’.10

The type of mental disintegration that Lê experienced after this bereavement, which led to her own hospitalization is explored in both Voix and Lettre morte (1999). Images of a dead and abandoned father and the destroying of precious letters haunt both texts. In Voix, for example, the daughter character burns the letters from her deceased father; he returns in a horrific vision and pulls the burnt, blue-inked papers out of her body.11 In Lettre morte, the narrator has a dream in which she tries to cradle her father’s head after the lover ‘Morgue’ decapitates him, but Morgue ties her to a tree to punish her for destroying their correspondence.12 The most horrific incidents and dreams in these texts feature father and daughter pairings. Yet Lê has stated that she does not wish these novels and Les Trois Parques (1997), (which also ends with the death of a father figure) to be read as veiled autobiography. She has aimed for the expression of a more universal sense of loss, mediated by specific styles, ‘J'ai tenté […]atteindre une dimension presque universelle, ne pas rester dans l'autobiographie, faire de la mort du père une mort symbolique. C'est pour cela que Les Trois Parques appartiennent au registre du mythe, Voix à celui du rêve et Lettre morte à la fantasmagorie’.13 The idea that the narrator of profound loss cannot be reduced to Lê herself is also underscored by the use of multiple narrators at the start of Voix, a series of mental hospital patients who each articulate an experience of falling, suffocating and wanting to strike out at God because of their great sense of hurt and abandonment.

The need to get beyond a state in which suffering is all-engulfing was addressed in Les Aubes, published in 2000. The male narrator, reports experiencing suicidal tendencies from the age of ten and longs for relief. Blinded by his third suicide attempt, he reviews his life, his parents’ destructive marriage and his idealization of his father’s mistress ‘Forever’, a writer who comforted him after his first suicide attempt, yet later died of anorexia. The narrator’s blindness has an ambiguous quality – it grants him insight and freedom from the ongoing sight of physical corruption that haunt Lê’s imaginary, yet it also isolates him. The novel has been read as a critical parable of the life of a writer.

Autres jeux avec le feu, a fourteen-part exploration of the relationships between writing and death, was published in 2002.

Lê’s most recent novel Personne was published in 2003. It reprises a fantasmagorical writing style, also traced in Lettre morte. It centres around an encrypted, fragmented text allegedly found in a computer’s memory, that relates a museum guard’s account of ‘[les] inquiétants phénomènes qui se déroulent sous ses yeux - les peintures s'animent, les marbres palpitent de désir de vie - et ses impressions sibyllines sur Prague’.14 Like other texts by Lê, the novel is constructed according to multiple points of view and challenges conservative notions of what is ‘real’.

1Lê, quoted in interview with France-Isabelle Langlois for Montreal Literary Festival 2002, Alternatives (8-9) (2002). Available online at http://www.alternatives.ca/article218.html.
2 Lê, quoted in interview with Catharine Argand, Lire (April 1999).
3 Yeager, Jack A. ‘Linda Lê’s Literary Project in France’, paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, (March 9-12, San Diego, C.A., 2000).
4 Lê, quoted in interview with Catharine Argand, Lire (April 1999).
5 As told to Thierry Guichard, ‘Un si tendre vampire’, Le Matricule des Anges (13) (September-October 1995)Le Matricule des Anges (13) (September-October 1995).
6 Lê, quoted in interview with Catharine Argand, Lire (April 1999).
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Lê, Linda Voix (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998), p. 45.
10 This quotation and the preceding one: Lê, quoted in interview with Catharine Argand, Lire (April 1999).
11 Lê, Linda Voix, p. 50.
12 Lê, Linda, Lettre Morte (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998), p. 57
13 Lê, quoted in interview with Catharine Argand, Lire (April 1999).
14 Alstat, Marie, ‘Un roman expérimental’, Lire (November 2003).

Un si tendre vampire ( Paris: Table Ronde, 1987)

Fuir (Paris: Table Ronde, 1988)

Solo (Paris: Table Ronde, 1989)

Les Évangiles du crime (Paris: Julliard, 1992)

Calomnies (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1993)

Les Dits d’un idiot (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1995)

Les Trois Parques (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997)

Voix (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998)

Lettre morte (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999)

Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Puf, 1999)

Les Aubes (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2000)

Marina Tsvetaïeva (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2002)

Autres jeux avec le feu (Paris: Christian Bourgois 2002)

Personne (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2003)

Le Complexe de Caliban (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005).

In Memoriam (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007).

Slander (Calomnies), trans. Esther Allen (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

Argand, Catharine ‘Linda Lê’, Lire (April 1999). Available online at <http://www.lire.fr/entretien.asp/idC=35595&idTC=4&idR=201&idG=>

Guichard, Thierry ‘Un si tendre Vampire’, Le Matricule des Anges (13) (September-October 1995). Available online at <http://www.lelibraire.com/din/tit.php?Id=3726#suite>

Langlois, France-Isabelle, ‘Entrevues avec trios écrivains venues d’ailleurs: entre la vie et la littérature, là-bas, ici et ailleurs’, Alternatives (June 4 2002). <Available online at <http://www.alternatives.ca/article218.html>

Bacholle-Boskovic, Michele, Linda Lê, l'écriture du manque (Edwin Mellen
Press, March 2006).

Bacholle-Boskovic, Michele, ‘The exiled woman’s burden: father figures in Lan Cao’s and Linda Lê’s Works’, Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies 6 (2) (fall 2002), 267-281.

— Linda Lê, l'écriture du manque (Edwin Mellen Press, March 2006).

Cousseau, Anne, 'Les voix de Linda Lê' in Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (eds.), Nouvelles écrivaines: Nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp.201-214.

Deck, Julia ‘Les Aubes’, Fluctuat,net. Available online at < http://www.fluctuat.net/livres/chroniques/aubes.htm>

Delvaux, Martine 'Linda Lê and the prosthesis of origin' in Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (eds.), Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp.201-11.

Do, Tess, 'Entre salut et damnation: métaphores chez Linda Lê', French Cultural Studies, 15.2 (1 June 2004).

— 'The Vietnamese Cooking Legacy: A Cultural and Post-colonial Exploration of Food Metaphors in Linda Lê's Les Trois Parques' in Essays in Modern Italian and French Literature 'In Recollection of Tom O'Neill', ed. Alastair Hurst and Tony Pagliaro, (Melbourne, Spurti e Ricerche: 2004), 30-40.

— 'Nourriture ou pourriture: une exploration de l'impact post-colonial du patrimoine français parmi les immigrants vietnamiens dans les romans de Linda Lê' in Food and Lifestyles in Oceania, Actes du Colloque CORAIL 2002, ed. Sonia Lacabanne, Noumea, 2003: 141-155

Evans Braziel, Jana 'Nomadism, Diaspora and Deracination in Contemporary Migrant Literatures' (thesis, Amherst: University of Massachussetts, 2000).

Fauvel, Maryse Scènes d'intérieur: six romanciers des années 1980-1990 (Birmingham AL: Summa Publications, 2007)

Frey, Pascal ‘Linda Lê, farouche et décalée’, Lire (May 2002). Available online at <http://www.lire.fr/critique.asp?idC=45649&idR=218&idG=3>

Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech 'Consuming culture: Linda Lê’s autofiction' in Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier (eds.), Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue (New York: Palgrave, 2001) pp.241-50.

Yeager, Jack 'Compte rendu: Linda Lê', Etudes francophones 13(1) (spring 1998), 259-62.

Forthcoming

Do, Tess 'From incest to exile: Linda Lê and the incestuous Vietnamese ommigrants' in Indochina, India and France: Cultural Representations, ed. Jennifer Yee and Kathryn Robson, (Lexington Books: 2005).

Srilata, Ravi, Towards a Progressive Sense of Spatial issues: Linda Lê's Calomnies, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002).

Christian Bourgois <http://www.christianbourgois-editeur.fr/som.htm>Lê's current editor. Her author page is at <http://www.christianbourgois-editeur.fr/ficheauteur.asp?num=8>

Entrevues avec trios écrivains venues d’ailleurs <http://www.alternatives.ca/article218.html> Interview by France-Isabelle Langlois for the Montreal International Festival of Literature 2002.

Linda Lê <http://www.lire.fr/entretien.asp/idC=35595&idTC=4&idR=201&idG=> Interview by Catharine Argand, Lire(April 1999).

Linda Lê, farouche et décalée <http://www.lire.fr/portrait.asp/idC=40022/idTC=5/idR=201/idG=>Portrait of the author by Pascal Frey, Lire (May 2002).

'Un si tendre Vampire'< http://www.lelibraire.com/din/tit.php?Id=3726#suite> Review and interview by Thierry Guichard for Le Matricule des Anges (13) (September-October 1995).

The Resident Tourist: Asian Immigrant Writers in France<http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~perspy/old/issues/1995/sep/france.html>Article by Julie C. Suk that refers to the work of Linda Lê.

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