Kim Thuy's short novel, Man -- which reads like a series of connected vignettes or long poems -- is a beautiful story of the loss and reclamation of identity as shaped by and viewed through food, love, marriage, children, and tradition.  It is a book that reminds us that the great disappointments and joys of life comes often in the small gestures and statements, in the little mistakes, that we recognize only by the length of their shadows over us.  This was a wonderfully evocative novel of Vietnamese culture, and of a woman's search to integrate her and her family's history with her own growing desires to live along an unpredicted path, for as long as that path carries her.  A wonderful heartbreak of a book that is to be savored.