Toronto writer Camilla Gibb was already deep into what was supposed to be her next novel.
She had a publication date, editors were on standby, but everything changed after a month-long trip to Vietnam that was supposed to be a little R and R tacked onto the end of a Southeast Asian book tour.
“The place was an absolute revelation,” says Gibb, now eight months pregnant, chatting over a decaf at a neighbourhood coffee shop. “Something about the culture just struck a chord.”
And when a friend she’d met in Hanoi relayed the story of an old noodle soup peddler, said to make the best soup in the city, who roamed city streets pushing his pho cart from spot to spot so he wouldn’t be arrested, she couldn’t resist.
The character, Hung, would be the glue that held her new novel together bridging the old world and the new world in a country where 60 per cent of citizens are young, born after the Vietnam War with dreams of a new life in the new liberalized economy.
“It got under my skin,” she explains. “I wasn’t looking for inspiration, and I did finish the other book, but this thing just kept nibbling away at me.”
Two sample chapters and a meeting with her publisher later, Gibb had tossed the last couple years of writing aside and immersed herself in Vietnam.
Despite the foreign environs, Gibb treads on familiar thematic ground. Namely, questions of the nature of family as well as the search for identity that have broad appeal no matter if it is a shantytown soup slinger or a character from one of her first two novels set closer to home. With a PhD in anthropology, and a reputation for an intricate use of language, letting it all hang out for her new novel has been an eye-opening experience for Gibb.
“With Sweetness [in the Belly], it was harder to write because there was too much information and the facts got in the way,” she explains. “It’s been very liberating to just know as much as I need to know and then jump off and swim.”
The Beauty of Humanity Movement is set in the city of Hanoi where Hung plies his pho trade and is a link to the idealistic artistic movement of the 1950s; Tu’ is a young dissatisfied tour guide in the new Vietnam; Maggie is Vietnamese by birth and returning to her roots in search of information regarding her father who disappeared during the war.
It is a dynamite read. The book will be released in early September, around the same time Gibb gives birth to her first child. For more information, go to www.camillagibb.ca.
