No Man's Land - Hardcover

Huong, Duong Thu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401366643 ISBN 13: 9781401366643

Publisher: Hyperion, 2005

Synopsis

From Vietnam's most popular writer and famous dissident comes a mesmerizing novel about a tragic love triangle between characters whose destinies have been irrevocably altered by the absurdity of war o Man's Land is set in a hamlet in the countryside of central Vietnam immediately following the end of the war in 1975, where 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.

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: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1401366643
• ISBN 13: 9781401366643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416