Memories of a Pure Spring - Softcover

Thu Huong Duong

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330488260 ISBN 13: 9780330488266

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2001

Synopsis

One of the bestselling Vietnamese novels of all time. A searing love story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Memories Of A Pure Spring was a huge bestseller when it was published in Vietnam in 1976 (it was subsequently, and still is, banned there). It is Huong's most commercial and engaging novel which deals with the aftermath of the war and how the ordinary Vietnamese people caught up in the conflict can readapt to their everyday lives and loves.

About this title

About the Author:

Duong Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of 20 she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front as singers during the Vietnam War. Of the volunteer group of 40 she was one of the three survivors. A vocal advocate dernocratic political reform she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1989 and imprisoned without trial for seven months in 1991. The Vietnamese government has banned all her novels. She lives in Hanoi. Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong live in Paris. They are the translators of the author's previous two books.

From Publishers Weekly:

Often considered the literary conscience of postwar Vietnam, Huong (Paradise of the Blind) tells the wrenching story of three people coping with the brutal realities, disillusion and dispossession suffered by Vietnamese artists and intellectuals after the "war against the Americans." Hung is a composer and director of an artistic troupe forced from his job after the revolution; his wife, Suong, is a renowned singer stifled by the responsibility of supporting the family; rounding out the triangle is Suong's jealous, scrappy younger brother, Vinh. Huong vividly captures the vertiginous period after the Communists' victory, when Hung is shocked to find that his wartime friends have suddenly become high-ranking, impassive bureaucrats in command of his fate. Once an idealistic revolutionary, Hung is crushed to realize that redistribution of wealth means only that a new class of apparatchiks has gleefully seized power and material comforts. Hung accidentally ends up on a boat fleeing Vietnam that is quickly intercepted by the authorities. He's sent to prison for re-education, then forced to live as a nonperson after his release, with no identity card, food rations or possibility of official employment. He anesthetizes the pain of his uselessness and the memories of brutality with alcohol, and his marriage nearly unravels, but a suicide attempt by Suong has the dubious effect of temporarily reconciling the family. While Huong has a fine ear for the smug thickheadedness of Communist bureaucrats, her observations about family life and the importance of art are overwrought. The author tends to overexplain what her characters are thinking, following up with redundant interior monologues. The translation is serviceable but unpolished; cliches slip into the descriptions (Suong indulges in "the pleasures of the flesh"; another character longs for "the open road"), and the dialogue is occasionally transposed into an unnatural, slangy American English. An uneven but powerful testament to the abuses of an oppressive regime, the novel's artistry doesn't always measure up to its moral urgency. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330488260
• ISBN 13: 9780330488266
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352