Linda Lê
Linda Lê was born in 1963 in Dalat, Saigon to a French mother and a Vietnamese father who was an engineer. Due to an incursion in 1968 by North Vietnamese troops in to South Vietnam, the 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-20th-century Vietnam, 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’. 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 in 2000, ‘Lê blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, French and Vietnamese, the personal and the plural.’
In 1969 the family moved to Saigon. In an interview with Catharine Argand in 1999, Lê 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.’
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. 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. In the interview with Argand, she states ‘J'éprouve une attirance pour les êtres funestes’. 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. 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.
In 1977, two years after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese troops, Lê, her mother and three sisters left 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?’
Lê spent the years from 1977 to 1981 at 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.
The 1980s saw Lê’s earliest works published in quick succession: Un si tendre vampire (1987), Fuir (1988) and Solo (1989). Lê does not regard these novels as equal in standard to her later work, and they do not always appear in formal bibliographies. To support herself she worked as a preface editor for Hachette. A collection of her prefaces 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. In 1993 Lê moved to Christian Bourgois Éditeur, starting a fruitful publishing relationship that has lasted to date.
Lê's beloved father died in 1995 as he was preparing to come to France for the first time. 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’.
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. 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. 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’. 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 is 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 imagination, 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, an exploration in 14 parts 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’. Like other texts by Lê, the novel is constructed along multiple viewpoints and challenges conservative notions of what is ‘real’.
2004 saw the publication of Kriss: suivi de, L’Homme de Porlock. The principal novella, Kriss, is a modernisation of the Electra complex, where Kriss herself awaits the return of her brother to exact revenge for her mother’s murder of her father. Vietnam appears war-torn through the eyes of the other, since the murdered father in question is an American Vietnam War Veteran. The themes of absence of the father, judgement of the mother figure and mythological representations all make a reappearance here.
Le Complexe de Caliban (2005) and Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau (2009), Lê’s most recent work, as well as Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999), construct a triad of non-fiction works, which discuss the importance and specific influences of literature on Linda Lê as a young girl. In the former, Lê pays homage to iconic French writers such as Hugo, Céline, Montaigne, Proust and Flaubert, the discovery of whom founded in her a love of French literature as a child in Saigon. She interprets the Caliban Complex as the heretic state of the foreign writer who is forced to express themselves in a language which is not their own.
In Au fond de l’inconnu Lê names authors who she found influential in her adult life as a writer. She does not restrict herself to French literature, but recognizes the work of Robert Walser, Ladislav Klíma and Ingeborg Bachmann, among 13 others. Brief portraits of each reveal Lê’s profound respect for and adoration of both their individual craft and solitary, often fatal, manner in which they chose to live their lives.
Written only two years apart, Conte de l’amour Bifrons (2005)and In Memoriam (2007), Lê’s last fictional publication of the decade, are connected by a fixation on suicide, itself not an uncommon theme in her work. The former novel sees Lê return to the narrative scene of Voix: une crise, a psychiatric hospital, where two suicidal young protagonists Ylane and Yvan fall impossibly in love. The latter novel allows Lê to explore both the exile she attributes to her own father’s flight from northern to southern Vietnam and the compulsion to write about one’s loss. Her protagonist, Sola, was a writer. She has committed suicide at the outset of the novel, while her life is narrated by the besotted brother of her lover. Throughout the course of the novel the reader experiences Sola’s father’s exile from Persia in Paris, his desolation and eventual suicide. Just like Lê herself, Sola is inconsolable, even a lifetime after the death, using writing as a cathartic exercise to express guilt, regret and loss.
Updated by Alexandra Kurmann (Macquarie)
Bibliography
Fiction and Essays
Un si tendre vampire (Paris: Table Ronde, 1987)
Fuir (Paris: Table ronde, 1988)
Solo: nouvelles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989)
Calomnies (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1993)
‘Les Pieds nus’, in Littérature vietnamienne: la part d’exil ed. by Le Huu Khoa (Aix-en Provence: Université de Provence, 1995, pp. 57-58)
Les Dits d’un idiot (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1995)
Les Trois Parques (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997)
Voix: une crise (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998)
Lettre morte (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999)
Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999)
Les Aubes (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2000)
‘Ça’ (La Pensée de midi, 2001/2, pp. 5-6)
Autres jeux avec le feu (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2002)
Personne (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2003)
Kriss suivi de L’homme de Porlock (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2004)
Le Complexe de Caliban (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005)
Conte de l’amour Bifrons (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005)
In memoriam (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007)
Les Évangiles du crime. 2nd ed (Paris: Christian Bourgois 2007 [first edition published by Julliard, 1992])
‘Une Porte sans clé, une clé sans porte’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 14, 2009, pp. 509-516)
Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009)
Cronos (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2010)
‘Tangages’, in Vietnam, le destin du lotus ed. by Alain Sancerni (Paris: Riveneuve, 2010, pp. 20-24)
‘Étranges étrangers’ (Carnets du Viêt Nam, 28, 2011, pp. 38-42)
À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (Paris: NiL éditions, 2011)
‘L’autre’, in Clair obscur: nouvelles (Paris: JBZ & Cie, 2011, pp. 33-45)
Lame de fond (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2012)
Œuvres vives (Paris: Bourgois, 2014)
Par ailleurs (exils) (Paris: Bourgois, 2014)
Roman (Paris: Bourgois, 2016)
Literary Criticism
‘Ingeborg Bachmann: un brasier d’énigmes’ (Le Quotidien de Paris 1989, p. 4)
‘“Tu écriras sur le bonheur”: Paul Nizon, L’Année de l’amour, Stolz, Dans le ventre de la baleine’ (Critique, XLVI, 522, 1990, pp. 971-977) [Reprinted as ‘Paul Nizon: Dans le ventre de la baleine’ in Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009, pp. 258-269)]
‘“J’écris sur la nature du feu”: Ingeborg Bachmann’ (Critique, XLVII, 534, 1991, pp. 846-854) [Reprinted as ‘Ingeborg Bachmann’ in Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009, pp. 30-43)]
‘La Méprise’ (Critique XLVII, 524-25, 1991, pp. 118-120)
Marina Tsvétaïéva: comment ça va la vie? (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 2002)
‘Le Voyageur d’une vie de flânerie: Natsume Sôseki, Les Herbes du chemin’ (Critique, XLIX, 550-51, 1993, pp. 249-251) [Reprinted as ‘Natsume Sôseki: Les Herbes du chemin’ in Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009, pp. 301-305)]
‘La Formule de l’aboulie: Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime tome XII’ (Critique, LI, 576, 1995, pp. 323-325) [Reprinted as ‘Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime (tome XII)’ in Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009, pp. 22-25)]
‘Heinrich Heine ou la déchirure du monde: Heinrich Heine, De la France; Gerhard Höhn, Heinrich Heine, un intellectuel moderne’ (Critique, LI, 582, 1995, pp. 889-891) [Reprinted as ‘Heinrich Heine, De la France’ in Tu écriras sur le bonheur (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2009, pp. 145-151)]
‘Préface’, in Tolstoï est mort (Christian Bourgois, 2010, pp. 7-12)
Translations into Foreign Languages
English
Slander [Translation of Calomnies by Esther Allen] (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996)
The Three Fates [Translation of Les Trois Parques by Mark Polizzotti] (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1997)
‘Voice Crisis’ [Translation of an excerpt from Voix: une crise by Deborah Treisman] (Grand Street, 67, 1999, pp. 27-33)
‘The Dead Won’t Let us Go’ [Translation of an excerpt from Lettre morte by Deborah Treisman] (Grand Street, 70, 2002, pp. 90-96)
Vietnamese
Vu Khống [Translation of Calomnies by Nguyễn Khánh Long] (Hanoi: Nhã Nam, 2009)
Lại Chơi Với Lửa [Translation of Autres jeux avec le feu by Nguyễn Khánh Long] (Hanoi: Nhã Nam, 2010)
Criticism
Assier, Julie: ‘L’obsession du père ou l’inscription autobiographique dans Les trois Parques de Linda Lê’ in Féminité et expression et soi: artistes et écrivaines au XXe siècle ed. by Brigitte Riera (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2008, pp. 15-49).
—: ‘Les migrances du moi: Calomnies de Linda Lê?’ (Francofonia: Francofonia Studi e ricerche sulle letterature di lungua francese 30.58, 2010, pp. 34-43)
Averis, Kate: ‘Neither Here nor There: Linda Lê and Kim Lefevre’s Literary Homecoming’ (Women in French Studies [Special issue: Women in the Middle], 2009, pp. 74-84)
—: Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (Oxford: Legenda, 2014)
Bacholle-Boskovic, Michèle: ‘The Exiled Woman’s Burden: Father Figures in Lan Cao’s and Linda Lê’s Works’ (Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies 6.2, 2002, pp. 267-281)
—: Linda Lê, l’écriture du manque (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006)
Barnes, Leslie: ‘Linda Lê’s Voix and the Crisis of Representation: Alterity and the Vietnamese Immigrant Writer in France’ (French Forum 32.3, 2007, pp. 123-138)
—: Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014)
Bradley Winston, Jane: ‘Playing Hardball: Linda Lê’s Les trois Parques’ in France and “Indochina”: Cultural Representations ed. by Robson Kathryn and Jennifer Yee (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, pp. 193-206)
Bui, Thi Thu Thuy: ‘Linda Lê: de l’exil du langage au langage de l’exil’ in Vietnam littéraire… traversées ed. by Julie Assier and C. Chaulet Achour (Amiens: Encrage Université et CRTF-UCP, 2012, pp. 193-206)
Chau-Pech Ollier, Leakthina: ‘Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autofiction’ in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue ed. by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier (New York: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 241-250)
Chevillot, Frédérique: ‘La mémoire en creux - Annie Ernaux et Linda Lê: Écrire la fiction du non-survenu’ (Women in French Studies [special conference issue], 2015, pp. 136-47)
Chirol, Marie-Magdeleine: ’Histoires de ruines: Calomnies de Linda Le’ (French Forum 29.2, Spring 2004, pp. 91-105)
Chiu, Lily V: ‘“An Open Wound on a Smooth Skin”: (Post)Colonialism and the Melancholic Performance of Trauma in the Works of Linda Lê’ (Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 21, 2009, pp. 1-26) and online
Chung, Ook: ‘Linda Lê, “tueuse en dentelles”‘ (Liberté 36. 2, 1994, pp. 155-161)
Cousseau, Anne: ‘Les voix de Linda Lê’ in Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? ed. by Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, pp. 201-213)
Dao, Thang Anh: ‘Exile of Freedom: The Nation-State and the Exile in Linda Lê’s Slander’ (Positions 20.3, 2012, pp. 713-736)
Delvaux, Martine: ‘Linda Lê and the Prosthesis of Origin’ in Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France ed. by Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001, pp. 201-211)
Do, Tess: ‘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, ed. by Sonia Lacabanne (Noumea: Actes du Colloque CORAIL, 2002 pp. 141-151)
—: ‘Entre salut et damnation: métaphores chez Linda Lê’ (French Cultural Studies 15.2, 2004, pp. 142-157)
—: ‘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. by Alastair Hurst and Tony Pagliaro (Melbourne: Spunti e ricerche, 2004, pp. 40-49)
—: ‘From Incest to Exile: Linda Lê and the Incestuous Vietnamese Immigrants’ in Indochina, India and France: Cultural Representations ed. by Jennifer Yee and Kathryn Robson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005, pp. 165-177)
Edwards, Natalie: ‘Deliberately Barren? The Rejection of Motherhood in Contemporary French Women's Life Writing' (Australian Journal of French Studies 52.1, January-April 2015, pp. 24-36)
—: Voicing Voluntary Childlessness:Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016)
Étienne, Marie-France: ‘Linda Lê ou les jeux de l’errance’ (Tangence 71, 2003, pp. 79-90)
Fauvel, Maryse: ‘Déterritorialisation de l’identité de la langue des personnages de Linda Lê’ (Romance Notes 42.3, 2002, pp. 329-339)
Favre, Isabelle: ‘Linda Lê: schizo-positive?’ (Présence Francophone 61, 2003, pp. 191-202)
Guichard, Thierry: ‘Le “Famille je vous hais!” de Linda Lê’ (Matricule des anges: Mensuel de la littérature contemporaine 20 August-20 October 1995, pp. 4-5)
—: ‘Linda Lê: L’astre noir’ (Matricule des anges: Mensuel de la littérature contemporaine 86, 2007, pp. 15-23)
Huston, Nancy: Professeurs de Désespoir (Paris: Actes Sud, 2004, pp. 322-330)
Kurmann, Alexandra: ‘Foreclosed Fatherhood: A Decade of Psychoanalytical Experimentation in Linda Lê’s Fiction’ in Experiment and Experience: Women’s Writing in France 2000-2010 ed. by Gill Rye and Amaleena Damlé (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 125-139)
—: ‘From Hungry Ghost to Phallic Mother: Linda Lê’s Doubling of the Vietnamese Ancestor in French Exile’ (Skepsi 6, Winter 2014-15, pp. 66-78)
—: ‘The Making of a Literary Case: Ingeborg Bachmann as a Case of Antigone in the Work of Linda Lê’ in Public Cases: Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge ed. by Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton (New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 203-218)
—: Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader (Lanham, ML: Lexington Books, 2016)
—: 'Internal Dialogue as Means of Collective Conflict Resolution in Linda Lê’s Exile Writing’ (Essays in French Literature and Culture 53, 2016)
Kurmann, Alexandra and Do, Tess: ‘Post-War Reunification: The Doppelganger as a Unifying Body in the Exile Literature of Linda Lê’ in New Perspectives of the Vietnam War: Essays on the War, the South Vietnamese Experiences, the Diaspora and the Continuing Impact ed. by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015, pp. 151-168)
Lay-Chenchabi, Kathryn, and Do, Tess: ‘Guilt and Betrayal in the Works of Azouz Begag and Linda Lê’ (French Cultural Studies 19.1, 2008, pp. 39-56)
Ledoux-Beaugrand, Evelyne: ‘Filles du père? Le spectre paternel chez quelques auteures contemporaines’ in Relations familiales dans les littératures française et francophone des XXe et XXIe siècles: I. La figure du père ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine Van Wesemael (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008, pp. 49-57)
Leek, Sara Elizabeth: ‘“L’écriture qui saigne”: Exile and Wounding in the Narratives of Nina Bouraoui and Linda Lê’ (International Journal of Francophone Studies 15.2, 2012, pp. 237-255)
Loucif, Sabine: ‘Le fantastique dans Les Trois Parques de Linda Lê’ in Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing ed. by Margaret-Anne Hutton (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 115-127)
—: ‘Linda Lê, la passeuse’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13.4, 2009, pp. 495-501)
Magnan-Park, Anne: ‘Se retrouver dans la langue: reécriture de mythes et contes occidentaux dans l’oeuvre de Linda Lê’ (Women in French Studies [Special Issue: Selected Essays from the Women in French International Conference 2006 at the University of New Hampshire], 2008, pp. 85-94)
McIlvanney, Siobhan: ‘“Les Mo(r)ts ne nous lâchent pas”: Death and the Paternal/Amorous Body in Linda Lê’s Lettre morte’ (The Romanic Review, 100, 2009, pp. 373-387)
Motte, Warren: ‘Linda Lê’s Language’ in Warren Motte: Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Chicago & Normal IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003, pp. 51-75)
Mouniama, Mai: ‘Linda Lê (1963- )’ in Multicultural Writers since 1945: An a-to-Z Guide ed. by Alba Amoia and Bettina L. Knapp (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 309-313)
Ni Cheallaigh, Gillian: ‘Voyelles mutilées, consonnes aux jambages arrachés: Linda Lê's Compulsive Tracing, Erasing, and Re-Tracing Fragments of the Self in Writing’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 18.4, September 2014, pp. 438-446)
—: ‘Bad Mothers, Mad Sisters and Queer Maternity in the work of Linda Lê’ in Solitaires, Solidaires: Conflict and Confluence in Women’s Writings in French ed. by Elise Hugueny-Léger and Caroline Verdier (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 191-207)
Ravi, Srilata: ‘Towards a Progressive Sense of Spatial Issues: Linda Lê’s Calomnies’ in Frontières 10 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris, 2003, pp. 55-68)
Sangars, Romaric: ‘Linda Lê: Discrète Antigone’ (Chronic’art 2 June, 2004,
Selao, Ching: ‘Folie et écriture dans Calomnies de Linda Lê’ (Présence Francophone: Revue Internationale de Langue et de Littérature 63, 2004, pp. 189-202)
—: ‘De l’exil à la parole exilée: l’impossible libération dans l’œuvre de Linda Lê’ in La Francophonie: esthétique et dynamique de libération ed. by Ibrahim H. Badr (New York: Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 135-152)
—: ‘Deuils et migrations identitaires dans les romans de Kim Lefèvre et de Linda Lê’ in Problématiques identitaires et discours de l’exil dans les littératures francophones ed. by Anissa Talahite-Moodley (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2007, pp. 275-297)
—: ‘Les figures mythiques de Linda Lê’ in Les Réécrivains: enjeux transtextuels dans la littérature moderne d’expression française ed. by Patrick Bergerson and Marie Carrière (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 77-96)
—: ‘Oiseaux migrateurs: l’expérience exilique chez Kim Thúy et Linda Lê’ (Voix et Images 40.1 (118), 2014, pp. 149-164)
Smith, Lise-Hélène: ‘The Disillusion of Linda Lê: Redefining the Vietnamese Diaspora in France’ (French Forum 35.1, 2010, pp. 59-74)
Tchumkam, H: ‘Entre France et Vietnam: Linda Lê et la problématique memorielle’ (Présence Francophone 79, 2012, pp. 85-97)
Van der Poel, Ieme: ‘Linda Lê et Julia Kristeva: Citoyennes de la langue française’ in Le Roman français au tournant du XXIè siècle ed. by Bruno Blanckeman, Aline Mura-Brunel and Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004, pp. 241-248)
Vaughan Roberts, Emily: ‘A Vietnamese Voice in the Dark: Three Stages in the Corpus of Linda Lê’ in Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays ed. by Kamal Salhi (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003, pp. 331-42)
Yeager, Jack A: ‘Culture, Citizenship, Nation: The Narrative Texts of Linda Lê’ in Post-colonial Cultures in France ed. by Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 255-267)
—: ‘Compte Rendu: Linda Lê’ (Études francophones 13.1, 1998, pp. 259-62)
Interviews/in the Media
Adler, Laure: ‘Linda Lê: Laure Adler reçoit Linda Lê, écrivain’ (France Culture, 2013) available online at http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-hors-champs-linda-le-2013-06-04
Argand, Catherine: ‘Entretien: Linda Lê’ (Lire, April 1999, pp. 28-33)
Barnes, Leslie: ‘Literature and the Outsider: An Interview with Linda Lê’ (World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 82.3, 2008, pp. 53-56).
Colombani, Marie-Françoise: ‘Linda Lê, l’âme à vif’ (Elle, 7 September 1998, p. 202)
Crépu, Michel: Écrire, écrire, pourquoi?: Entretien de Linda Lê avec Michel Crépu (Paris : Éditions de la bibliothèque publique d'information, 2010)
Guichard, Thierry: ‘Entretien. Linda Lê: “Tout doit être sacrifié pour l’écriture”‘ (Matricule des anges: mensuel de la littérature contemporaine 20 August-20 October 1995, pp. 6-7)
Kurmann, Alexandra: ‘An Interview with Linda Lê’ (19 November 2010) available online at https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/Centres/Linda_Le_Interview.pdf
Landel, Vincent: ‘Une âme monstrueuse’ (Magazine Littéraire 314, 1994, pp. 76-77)
Landrot, Marine: ‘Linda Lê: “J’aime que les livres soient des brasiers”‘ (Télérama, 21 August 2010) available online at http://www.telerama.fr/livre/linda-le-j-aime-que-les-livres-soient-des-brasiers,59204.php
Langlois, France-Isabelle: ‘Entrevues avec trois écrivaines venues d’ailleurs: entre la vie et la littérature, là-bas, ici et ailleurs’ (Le Journal des Alternatives 8.9, 2002)
Loucif, Sabine: ‘Entretien avec Linda Lê’ (The French Review 4.80, 2007, pp. 880-893)
—: ‘Entretien avec Linda Lê’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13.4, 2009, pp. 503-508)
Ni Cheallaigh: 'La "lectrice" douc, écrivaine mortifière: Rencontre avec Linda Lê' (17 October 2013) available online at https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/Centres/Nicheallaigh%20-%20Le%20interview.pdf
Schwerdtner, Karin: ‘Linda Lê: risquer le tout pour le tout’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 17.3, 2013, pp. 309-317)
Interviews in Vietnamese
Long, Mai: ‘Linda Lê–Tài Nǎng Việt Trên Vǎn Đàn Thế Giới’ [Linda Lê–Vietnamese talent on the international literary arena] (Baomoi 29 October, 2010) available online at http://www.baomoi.com/Home/SachBaoVanTho/www.doisongphapluat.com.vn/Lina-Le--Tai-nang-Viet-tren-van-dan-the-gioi/5123336.epi
Vǎn, Hà: ‘Nhà Vǎn Páp Gốc Việt Linda Lê: “Tôi Không Có Ý Định Từ Chối Gốc Gác” [French writer of Vietnamese origin Linda Lê: ‘I have no intention of refusing my origins’] (Suckhoedoisong October 29, 2010) available online at http://suckhoedoisong.vn/van-hoc/nha-van-phap-goc-viet-linda-le-toi-khong-co-y-dinh-tu-choi-goc-gac--2010102801382836.htm