The Deep Green Sea: A Novel - Hardcover

Robert Olen Butler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805031308 ISBN 13: 9780805031300

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

In The Deep Green Sea, Robert Olen Butler has created a memorable and incandescent love story between Tien, a contemporary Vietnamese woman orphaned in 1975, when the city finally fell to the Communists, and Ben, a Vietnam veteran who returns from America to a war-torn land, seeking closure and a measure of peace. Bit by bit they learn more of each other's pasts. Secrets are revealed: Ben's love affair with a Vietnamese prostitute in 1966; Tien's mixed racial heritage and her abandonment by her bar-girl mother, who feared retribution from the North Vietnamese for having given birth to one of the hated "children of dust." In Butler's hands, what follows conjures the stuff of classical tragedy and also achieves a classic reconciliation of once-warring cultures. Infused equally with eroticism and with Butler's deep and abiding reverence for Vietnamese myth and history, The Deep Green Sea is a landmark work in the literature of love and war.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler is the author of seven novels, six of which are available in Owl editions, the most recent being Tabloid Dreams (Owl Books, 0-8050-5589-4), and two volumes of stories, including the Pulitzer Prize winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

From Kirkus Reviews

An ambitious, lyrical exploration of the lingering wounds of the Vietnamese war, familiar terrain for Pulitzer Prizewinning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993, etc.). Ben, a rootless American veteran, has gone back to Vietnam in what seems to be an attempt to recapture the strong, strange sense of being alive that his combat experiences gave him. It's a feeling that nothing in his life since then has matched. The country he goes back to is still suitably different, the aroma of diesel fumes and sweet spices in Ho Chi Minh City are the same, but the place also seems now deeply self-involved, withdrawn, wary. Except, that is, for Tien, a striking young woman who works for the Vietnamese Tourist Authority and finds herself powerfully, disturbingly drawn to Ben. Their swift courtship and rather urgent affair are rendered in a prose of great, simple power. Of course, given the history of their nations, their love is necessarily dangerousand fragile. It is made more so by their personal histories: Ben has never quite gotten over his love for a Saigon bar girl he met during his tour of duty. And Tien, who was raised by her grandmother after her mother, a prostitute, abandoned her, still longs to confront her mother and find out who her father was. Tien and Ben find themselves being swept up into an increasingly frantic search for Tien's mother, a quest that sets in motion a series of tragic events. But it's obvious to readers long before it's clear to Ben and Tien just what they're going to find, and the tragedy Butler is building up to feels simply too unlikely for it to be as moving as he means it to be. Butler's prose is precise, sensuous, and moving. While the novel falls short of its goal, it is nonetheless an honest and intermittently powerful attempt to find some redemptive possibilities in the lingering nightmare of that war. (First printing of 75,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805031308
• ISBN 13: 9780805031300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240