Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shocking and moving, very well written, 21 Sep 2002
The Vietnamese author was involved in combat herself, and as a result this novel is often gritty in its realist approach to life during combat and conditions in Vietnam.
The loose narrative follows the daily life of Vietnamese soldier, exploring his changing attitudes to the regime he has fought for over the last ten years and his relationships with his family and friends, giving a fascinating insight into what it is to have lived in Vietnam at this time.
The novel is often lyrical and beautiful, but also sickening and shocking in its description of the reality of war, its language and sexual content.
The author is a dedicated promoter of human rights and reform. Her novels have been withdrawn from circulation in Vietnam and this novel's publication caused her to be arrested and imprisioned on false charges of having sent documents containing state secrets abroad. The fact that is novel is on sale in the western world is a literacy and humanitarian triumph for her.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vividly-written, beautiful and disturbing., 10 Oct 2003
This novel tells the story of a young Vietnamese soldier, sent home on leave during the Vietnam War. His travel through the country, and through his own war-centred memories, make a haunting tale, elements of which stick in the mind strongly for a long time afterwards. Weaving together family stories, personal experience, dreams and cynical reflections, the story convinces of the ruin of war, at an individual level and at ever higher complexities of society. I found the oddly mundane feel of the telling of extraordinary events especially disturbing - humans can and do adapt to almost anything, this book says, and it's true.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Disenchantment with war, 20 Oct 1998
By A Customer
This book is narrated by Quan, a twenty-eight year-old soldier of the North Vietnamese Army who, after spending ten years in the jungles of central Vietnam, is thoroughly disillusioned by the horrible and absurd realities of war. The narrator's tone is one of disenchantment, of wistful longing for all that has been lost--youth, life, love, family. As also shown in Paradise of the Blind, Duong Thu Huong has a skill for detailed descriptions of everyday objects and scenes, which are often made grotesquely surreal by her minute, harsh, objective observations. For example, in describing the decrepit mental and physical state of Quan's childhood friend Bien, she writes, "He sat in a pile of filth and excrement, surrounded by pools of milky, rancid urine. A torn calendar. An old tin can filled with water." Everything touched upon by the war--the natural environment, the people--is made ugly, thus adding to the war's horror. Even her flowers are drenched in red colors of blood. In such an environment of degradation and death, people struggle to retain the smallest hint human decency. This struggle is movingly portrayed in the episode when Quan spends a night in a field station, the sole personnel of which is a homely girl who heroically goes about burying her dead comrades. Though forced by duty to spend the best years of her life in a bleak environment, she tries to retain some of her youthful feminine idealism by decorating her cave-room with pictures of French singers and a paper flower, and washing and combing her hair to get rid of the stench of human corpses which never goes away. Her futile effort in trying to get Quan to make love to her expresses a tragic desperation. The book has no main conflict, other than Quan's personal, psychological, spiritual conflict. As such, the book has no central story-line, but is rather a series of dramatic episodes of the last days of the war, interspersed with reveries that are sometimes nightmarish, sometimes poetically dreamy. The book raises the question: Is ideological glory worth its heavy price paid for in the irrevocable LOSS of love, life, and innocence.
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