The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir - Hardcover

Weigl, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802116612 ISBN 13: 9780802116611

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Chronicles the author's life by focusing on his experience in the Vietnam War and showing how he has coped with the aftermath by turning to poetry and family.

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Reviews

Adult/High School-Weigl tells his story within the framework of his 1996 trip to Vietnam to bring back his newly adopted daughter, Hanh. As he waits in Hanoi for the bureaucracy to approve his visit, he flashes back to other equally poignant moments in his life. In breathtakingly lyrical prose, he re-creates his past. He shows the small boy growing up as the son of a tough steelworker in Lorrain, OH; the older boy taken advantage of by his cheerleader baby-sitter; the innocent 19-year-old soldier in the rice paddies of Vietnam; and, finally, the award-winning poet, friend of Vietnam, and honored translator of Vietnamese poetry. The childhood vignettes capture not only the description and color of the `50s, but also its moods and temper. The flashbacks to the Vietnam War are more subtle than graphic, and more powerful because of that subtlety. Despite all that has been written about that war, Weigl finds new words that bring its experience straight to readers' hearts. For him, the return to Vietnam to adopt a child of that land as his own completes this circle of his life. For readers, that trip is poignant and unforgettable.-Becky Ferrall, Stonewall Jackson High School, Manassas, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Vietnam War remains a haunting subtext for acclaimed poet Weigl (Song of Napalm, etc.), whose 1967 induction into the U.S. Army and year in Vietnam led to his passion for that country's poetry and culture. In this eager but uneven memoir, Weigl recounts his life storyAfrom his hard-bitten childhood in Lorain, Ohio, to a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his adopted daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. Weigl's reverence for storytelling, forged the day a Red Cross worker flung Crime and Punishment at him as he lay sick at a base camp in An Khe, serves as a touchstone throughout this book; he seeks salvation by way of "the great chain of stories." Most memorable are stories from his Zagreb-born grandfather, who oversaw the birth of his first child (at the hands of a drunken doctor hastily pulled away from a late-night card game at the Slovak Club) by holding a gun to the doctor's head to ensure the child's safe delivery. But Weigl's own stories seem to squirm away just as he grasps their elemental truth, leaving raw, underworked passages in their stead. As he tries to mediate the silences and shames that pockmark his life, he seems to find not salvation but deepening realms of pain: "I had done so much traveling in the world of hurt that had been my life," he writes, "that the boundaries we need in order to be human had vanished." (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Weigl has written or edited 17 books of his own poetry, Vietnamese poetry in translation, and criticism of poetry, so the opening of his autobiography comes as a shock. "I was not raised to be a man who cares for words as if they were living things," he reveals. "From birth, I headed in a direction away from books." Much of the rest of the book is the record of his early reticence, inarticulateness, and silence. Not that he lived amid taciturnity: his father and maternal grandparents loved to tell family stories, and Weigl relays some of those that most affected him. It was rather that a few powerful experiences alienated him: sexual abuse at age four by a teenage babysitter; a sudden move from a welcoming neighborhood back to a former, colder one; and, above all, the Vietnam War, the horrors of which pitched Weigl into "the long and drowsy years of no imagining" and of too many drugs, drinks, and one-night stands. Eventually, he "woke up among words," rediscovered love, and returned to Vietnam often, in 1996 to pick up an orphan he intended to adopt and for whom he endured the ordeal with which he frames his other recollections. For all their pain, those anguished memories are hauntingly beautiful to read, thanks to Weigl's chasteness of diction, sonorousness, and use of such songlike devices as the refrain. This book is a life experience as well as a reading experience. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802116612
• ISBN 13: 9780802116611
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208