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From Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed author and political dissident Huong (Memories of a Pure Spring, etc.) takes a hard look at the long-term repercussions of war in her latest novel. The luxuriantly beautiful village of Mountain Hamlet in central Vietnam is the setting for the story of Mein, a woman who learns that the husband she married 14 years ago and lived with for only a few weeks before he was sent off to fight in the Vietnam War, has actually survived and returned to claim her. Though she deeply loves her current husband, Hoan, and their son, she feels pressured by the strictures of her Communist community to return to her first husband, Bon, to honor the sacrifice he made for his country. The decision proves even harder because of Bon's repulsive physical condition and the abject poverty in which he lives. In long flashbacks, the novel follows Bon through his war experiences, and Hoan through the troubled events of his own past and present, revealing much about Vietnamese society in the process. This technique humanizes Hoan and Bon even as they each idolize Mein and her demure beauty. The outsize emotions of the two men and the tropical landscape lend an air of melodrama, but Mein's more calculating sensibility and the complicated choices she makes to satisfy herself and society keep the novel from descending into sentimentality. Agent, Anna Soler-Pont at Pontas Literary and Film Agency. (Apr. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Banned dissident Vietnamese author Huong continues to write lyrical, psychologically astute, and extraordinarily affecting novels. As she did in Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and does even more acutely here, Huong evokes the beauty of the land, Vietnam's ancient traditions, and the timeless rhythms of daily life in counterpoint to the tragedies of communist oppression and war. Elegant Mien and her thoughtful and successful husband, Hoan, seem blessed until Bon, Mien's first husband, a soldier long believed dead, suddenly reappears. As Huong dramatizes in flashbacks almost surreal in their intensity and strangeness, Bon has endured horrors beyond comprehension, and is now a broken man with only one dream, to be reunited with Mien. All the villagers seem to believe that he has every right to ask Mien to forfeit her domestic paradise and join him in his hovel, and his misery. Privy to the anguished thoughts of each character caught in this strangling web of desperation, duty, sacrifice, desire, compassion, and rage, Huong spins a captivating tale precise in details and grand in scope. A ravishing novel that exquisitely parses the nature of war and peace, material and spiritual poverty and wealth, self and community, coercion and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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