Memories of a Pure Spring

This novel tells the story of a singer and her composer husband and explores their relationships passionate growth in the midst of war. Huong vividly depicts the betrayal she and a generation of Vietnamese artists and writers experienced after the war: the conditions inside re-education prison camps, and the corruption at the heart of the new regime they brought to power.

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.)
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Vietnamese dissent author Huong (Novel Without a Name, 1995, etc.) continues her criticisms of Communist Party injustices by focusing on her country's performing artists. In a complex and initially confusing divided narrative, Huong explores the interrupted careers and embattled marriage of eminent composer Hoang Hung and his (younger) wife Suong, a peasant girl from the mountains of central Vietnam whose innate musical ability earns her fame as ``the nightingale with the crystal voice. The opening chapters focus on Suong's recuperation from a failed suicide attempt, as observed by her teenaged brother Vinh (who openly despises Hung, from whom Suong had been estranged). Then Huong presents a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, to Suong's early life and her decision to leave home and become a singer; her experiences with Hung among a troupe of performers compelled to offer celebrations of their country's revolution; Hung's subsequent sufferings in prison (where he's sent because, in his words, ``I just happened to be on a beach the night that a bunch of boat people were fleeing this country''); and his bitter reunion afterward with Suong, who cant forgive either her husband's or her own infidelity and weakness. Memories . . . climaxes with savage irony when, five years after war's end, Huong is (technically) repatriatedtoo late to save him from his own harsh self-judgment. The story has powerbut, in this translation, at least, Huong never uses one highly charged verb or adjective when half a dozen will serve as well. Her penchant for melodramatic overstatement obscures her tales evident truthfulness and blunts its impact as political commentary. All honor to Huong's courage and persistence. One accepts her as an authoritative witness, while wishing she were a better novelist. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the author of two critically acclaimed previous novels, Novel Without a Name (LJ 1/95) and Paradise of the Blind (LJ 2/15/93), comes a third on the subject of life in postwar Vietnam, her native country. Duong, the leader of an artistic troupe and later an exile, brings a unique sense of realism and credibility to the story of composer Hung Pham and his wife, Mai Suong. On the exterior, readers find a successful composer who is happily married to his child-bride and is the father of two young daughters. Delving deeper into this novel, which is steeped in a heavy political climate, readers discover a complex telling of love and betrayal on various levels: between a husband and wife, a man and his art, and a man and his country. Duong takes readers on a journey into the human psyche by looking at the frailty of the human condition and asks readers to confront issues like depression, attempted suicide, infidelity, and drug and alcohol abuse. The threads of love that bind her characters together are the same threads that break them. An intense and sometimes dark novel; Asian literature collections and libraries with Duong's other works will want to have this one.
-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
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