Dương Thu Hương

Quan, who enlists to fight for his country as an idealistic 18-year-old, has now fought for North Vietnam for a decade. Those ten years have taught him, if nothing else, the costs of idealism. Even as he tries to balance his patriotism with his cynicism, Quan turns to old memories for solace. Given the chance to return home, he seizes on the chance to make the physically and psychologically demanding journey. That journey forces him to confront his past, among other things: his father, his show more childhood sweetheart, his boyhood friends now maimed or dead, and ultimately to recognize that his innocence and his idealism came at an enormous price. How should he handle his disillusionment with the Communist Party? A quiet, emotionally charged book, this often reads like the stories of an old man looking back on his life. That it is, instead, the reflections of a 28-year-old veteran, told mostly through a series of vignettes, illustrates the power of the book. Indeed, the collection of loosely connected “stories” really can be seen as almost a mythic quest by a hero toward (self-)knowledge. show less

To understand Duong Thu Huong's novels, it is important to understand her background. At the age of twenty, Duong left college and volunteered to lead a Communist Youth Brigade to the front in the "War Against the Americans." She served in one of the most bombed regions of the war and was one of three survivors out of her group of twenty. She was also at the front during the 1979 Chinese attack on Vietnam. But during the 1980s, she became a critic of the Communist regime and an advocate for show more human rights. She was expelled from the party in 1989, imprisoned briefly in 1991 (the year she published this novel), and had her passport revoked so she could not leave the country. Her books were extremely popular prior to her imprisonment, but they are now banned and everything she has written since then has had to be published abroad, despite being written for a Vietnamese audience.

Novel Without a Name is the story of Quan, a young Communist soldier who, when the story opens, has been fighting the Americans for ten years. He left his village at the age of eighteen, excited for glory and idealistic about his nation's role in history. But after ten years of hunger, disease, and killing, "there is this gangrene that eats at the heart." He is summoned to company headquarters by a former classmate, who tells him that their friend has been imprisoned in a camp for psychiatric cases, and can he go and see what might be done for him. Afterward he is given leave to visit their hometown for a couple of days. But his brief visit is not a return to his dreamed of childhood, it is the source of more disillusionment.

Never. We never forget anything, never lose anything, never exchange anything, never undo what has been. There is no way back to the source, to the place where the pure, clear water once gushed forth.

Quan's idealism may be in tatters, but the war goes on. He returns to the front and further horrific warfare, corruption, and spiritual decay.

Duong has said that she never intended to become a writer. She served as an exemplary soldier, hoarding her impressions, and began to write as an expression of her pain. That pain is clearly reflected in Quan's odyssey between war and home and back again. show less

You know the kind of book you buy because you know it will be good, but then you side-eye it on your shelves because you also know it will be devastating, and you are just so seldom in the mood for devastating? Yeah, that was this book. I finally took it off the shelves and read it because it was from this month's region for the Read the World 21 challenge, which I am grateful for. I ended up really loving this book, even as I spent most of it wanting to strangle one of the main show more characters.

Summoned by telegram to help her ailing uncle, Hang spends most of her time on the train reminiscing over her childhood. Now a textile worker in Russia, Hang grew up without a father in the slums of Hanoi, Vietnam. But she remains connected to her mother's rural home village by her Aunt Tam, who has attached herself to Hang as the only continuation of her family line.

Hang's entire life is shaped by something that happened years before she was born. Her mother's brother, Uncle Chinh, came back from war as an official in charge of land reform. Hang's mother has married someone in the landowner class, and in the upheaval of land reform her father is exiled, Aunt Tam loses everything, and Hang's mother eventually flees to Hanoi. While Hang's father dies in exile (after a brief reappearance during which he fathers Hang), Hang, her mother, Aunt Tam, and Uncle Chinh remain both bound together and torn apart by their shared history, their dedication to shar4ed blood, and the failures of Vietnam's experiments in Communism.

By turns beautiful and heartbreaking. So glad I finally read it. show less

Novel Without a Name is a cynical, bitter, and clear-eyed account of war from the Vietnamese side. The narrator, Quan, is a company commander, responsible for the lives of 100 men, and particularly responsible for the life of his childhood friend Bien, who has gone mad.

This is a novel about war, but it's not one about combat. Battles are treated perfunctorily, a few sentences describing horrific causalities. What concerns Quan are his peregrinations through the war zone, and the soldier's show more obsession with food, distance, and a place to sleep at night. The war ages soldiers before their time, casts them adrift from both the rhythms of their traditional villages and exiles them from the benefits of modernity.

Huong was a North Vietnamese soldier for the period described, and this book has the bronze ring of authentic truth, emotional without being sentimental, lyrical in its description of the countryside and the privation of the soldiers, and bravely truthful about the broken glories of liberation. show less