Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong, Nina McPherson (Translator), Phan Huy Duong (Translator)

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Synopsis

A piercing, unforgettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war, Novel Without a Name will shatter every preconception Americans have about what happened in the jungles of Vietnam. With Duong Thu Huong, whose Paradise of the Blind was published to high critical acclaim in 1993, Vietnam has found a voice both lyrical and stark, powerful enough to capture the conflict that left millions dead and spiritually destroyed her generation. Banned in the author's native country for its scathing dissection of the day-to-day realities of life for the Vietnamese during the final years of the "Vietnam War," Novel Without a Name invites comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front and other classic works of war fiction. The war is seen through the eyes of Quan, a North Vietnamese bo doi (soldier of the people) who joined the army at eighteen, full of idealism and love for the Communist party and its cause of national liberation. But ten years later, after leading his platoon through almost a decade of unimaginable horror and deprivation, Quan is disillusioned by his odyssey of loss and struggle. Furloughed back to his village in search of a fellow soldier, Quan undertakes a harrowing, solitary journey through the tortuous jungles of central Vietnam and his own unspeakable memories.

Annotation

This is the powerful, deeply personal story of Vietnam's war against Americans as lived from the inside by North Vietnamese soldiers and villagers on the front lines. Vietnamese dissident Duong Thu Huong bears personal witness to the horror and spiritual weariness of ten years of war that claimed millions of Vietnamese lives.

Publishers Weekly

In the American mindset, two archetypes of the Vietnamese people have survived the end of the war in 1975-that of the unctuous and corrupt Southerner and that of the fanatically robotic Northerner. Neither stereotype, of course, is particularly accurate, and now a crop of Vietnamese writers is starting to actively dispel them. Quan, the disillusioned protagonist of this powerful novel, was a political idealist when he began his decade of army service for the Saigon government. Now, at age 28, his mind and body are weary, his hair prematurely gray. Close to the breaking point, he is sent on a strange mission behind the lines, where his childhood friend, Bien, is imprisoned, apparently having lost his mind. Nearby is Quan's native village, where his childhood sweetheart is now a pregnant pariah, and where other unhappy disclosures await Quan. He returns to the front in time for a bloody battle at war's end. Told in a series of impressionistic vignettes, the story is filled with incidents that bring home the insanity of military conflict, but the violence and brutality are conveyed in imagery rather than explicit description. Duong (Paradise of the Blind), a former Communist Party member, writes with integrity and an artist's sensibility and enhanced visual perception. The narrative is permeated with almost surreal sensual detail: the stench of rotting bodies, the sweet, sickly smell of drugs, the remembered fragrance of a field of violets in peacetime. Quan's searing memories and experiences pulse with anguish, and if Duong sometimes lets pathos approach bathos, she has, at the very least, created a hero capable of shattering stereotypes. First serial to Grand Street. (Feb.)