Dragon Hunt

Over the years, writers such as Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr have written about the Vietnam War and its aftermath from an American soldier's perspective; Robert Olen Butler, on the other hand, performed a feat of cultural ventriloquism in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, describing the country, the conflict, and its aftermath from a (mostly civilian) Vietnamese point of view. There's something to be said for the genuine article, however, and in The Dragon Hunt, Tran Vu writes of diaspora, exile, and loss with the wisdom only experience can give. Born in Saigon in 1962, Vu fled his country 16 years later in a small, overcrowded boat that eventually wrecked on a coral reef. For 10 days he survived in the water, and this horrific experience is at the center of the first of five stories, "The Coral Reef."Arms flailed like tentacles through the portholes, trying to get a grip on the hull. People were jumping overboard. Some were struggling through the wreckage to get to the sealed cabins, where we could hear the screams of the trapped women and children. By some instinct, I jumped into the sea. From the clean, spare terror of shipwreck, Vu moves to a more claustrophobic (and, unfortunately, more purple) rendering of domestic horror in "Gunboat on the Yangtze," a dark and violent tale of madness and incest. These two stories stake out opposite extremes on the spectrum of Vu's writing style. The other three fall somewhere in between, but even the least among them is infused with a fierce intelligence and remarkable insight into the complex connections between memory, loss, and desire. In The Dragon Hunt, Vietnam, at last, speaks for itself. --Alix Wilber

The Vietnam Tran Vu portrays in the five unapologetically frank stories of this collection (his first to be translated into English) is a desperate, deeply troubled place. Himself an emigrant, Tran Vu puts his characters through trials as harrowing as his have been. Each of the five stories taps a different portion of the emigrant experience, from exile in France to the return to war-torn cities. In "The Coral Reef" hundreds of Chinese-Vietnamese escaping the failed socialism of the postwar era are shipwrecked and struggle to survive, endangered by dwindling water supplies and circling sharks. Elder Sister, the narrator of "Gunboat on the Yangtze," endures her scarred brother's frantic attempts to connect to life through rape and a sexual relationship. The title story is a harrowing fable of postwar Vietnam combining lyrical prose and gory images to create a surreal emotional landscape. The spareness of Tran Vu's prose, which McPherson and Duong translate ably, tends to give short shrift to narrative tension. The complexities of Vietnamese society?the rivalries between the North and South, ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese, the haves and the have-nots?are, however, handled with sensitivity and insight by the tough survivalist characters. (Mar.) FYI: An adaptation of "The Coral Reef" first appeared in Granta.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first fiction title under the new Hyperion East rubric is an exciting collectionits Vietnamese author's third, and first to appear in Englishof five stories about his homeland's long endurance of war, political division, and the dispersal of its population. The opening story, though somewhat resembling Stephen Crane's ``The Open Boat,'' displays real originality in the use of its striking title metaphor (``The Coral Reef'') to suggest the impediments to complete escape sought by ``boat people'' leaving Saigon in the late 1970s. A more specific form of displacement is explored in ``Nha Nam,'' a plaintive homage to the authors distinguished contemporary writer Nguyen Huy Thiep, here fictionalized as a neglected master who now owns and operates a ``regional-specialties restaurant.'' The long title story skillfully blends realism with indigenous myth in an intense chronicle of refugees relocated at a mountainside estate ``a thousand leagues from our homeland.'' An American military attack, a rapacious act of sexual appropriation, and the inviting details of a bizarre surrealist painting eerily commingle to objectify the chaotic emotions shared by people uprooted from their homes and mesmerized by unending violence. Tran Vu's gift for dramatic intensity shows to best advantage in ``The Back Streets of Hoi An,'' the story of an adulterous wife whose surrender to her cruel lover ironically parallels the fate of the title citys invasion by northern Vietnamese nomads and the massacre of its populace in the mid-11th century. A similar intensity runs throughout the Zola-like ``Gun boat on the Yangtze,'' the confession of a guilty woman whose incestuous love for her monstrously disfigured younger brother depicts the psychic burdens imposed by family feeling, responsibility, and insularity ( . . . I know we no longer belong to the moral, human world''). The density of emotion that suffuses Tran Vu's stories, along with a vigorous style that subtly uses the conventions of melodrama, make this vivid collection arguably the best fiction we have seen yet from Vietnam. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Filled with bizarre and brutal imagery, these strange stories are the creations of one of Vietnam's most controversial young writers. In "The Coral Reef," an autobiographical piece, Tran Vu captures the hopelessness and despair of the boat people. During the crossing, the overloaded boat runs aground on a reef. The 400 passengers, which include women and children, are thrown into shark-infested waters; they have no food or water. Somehow, they manage to save themselves. The melding of generations and cultures is the theme of "The Dragon Hunt," filled with rich descriptions of the land, the culture, and the survivors. In addition, conflicting morals, family members without souls, and a bewildered outsider are key elements in a psychodrama filled with blood, cruelty, and extreme rage and hate. All of the stories in this small sampling are disturbing. Recommended for specialized collections.AJanis Williams, Shaker Heights P.L., OH
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.