No Man's Land: A Novel - Softcover

Huong, Duong Thu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786888571 ISBN 13: 9780786888573

Publisher: Hachette Books, 2006

Synopsis

Now in paperback, a mesmerizing novel about a tragic love triangle between three characters whose destinies have been inextricably linked by war, from Vietnam's acclaimed writer and famous dissident

No Man's Land is set in a hamlet in the countryside of central Vietnam immediately following the end of the war in 1975. The novel's plot is set in motion when a young woman, happily married to a successful farmer, comes home one day to find a throng of villagers assembled around her gate. She learns that her first husband, who reportedly died as a martyr and war hero many years back, is in fact alive and has returned to claim her.

Faced with the immense pressure of the community and the Party authorities, who forced her marriage to the soldier on the day he was to leave for the front, she dutifully agrees to leave her second husband and their son to live in a squalid shack with the veteran. This tragic twist of fate gives the novel a powerful narrative drive that makes it Huong's most accomplished work to date.

About this title

About the Author:

Duong Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. Of the volunteer group of forty, she was one of only three survivors. A vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform, Huong was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990 before she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Though her novels are banned in Vietnam, where she continues to live in internal exile, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad.

Translators Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong live in Paris. They have also translated Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind (1993), Novel Without a Name (1995), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and Beyond Illusions (2002).

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)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0786888571
• ISBN 13: 9780786888573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 460