Customer Reviews

Annam

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A love story told so dispassionately it is as if it the events described were witnessed by some extraterrestrial species. A beautiful, tragic, succinct, but potent tale of the voyage, settlement, and eventual demise of the first French mission to Vietnam by Dominican nuns & friars circa 1787-1797. Forgotten by the world as the Terror overcomes the French government and Church, the last two survivors, a nun and a monk, make their way into the rainy forests of the hinterlands to take shelter among an obscure tribe of Montagnards. Forgetting all the superficial cultural baggage they have acquired in their past life, they cling desperately to one another, fall into 'sin,' and eventually die of unknown tropical diseases. The pair are remembered only by the locals, who erect a wooden cross in their memory, which fifty some years later is discovered and destroyed by an incredulous band of French explorers unwilling not to have been the 'first'. A touching and memorable little fable about the transitory and illusory nature of Western culture and religion in an alien tropic land.

Bataille's slim debut novel opens in the great halls of the Palace of Versailles in the year 1787 when the young Emperor of Vietnam comes to Louis XVI's court. The young emperor has been sent by his father to seek the help of France to aid his father the Prince Regent Nguyen Anh in a battle with the revolting provinces. Yet during this time Louis XVI is having his own troubles and is unwilling to help the young Emperor and his country.

Lonely and unable to speak French, the young emperor befriends Bishop Pierre Pigneau de Bréhaine who teaches him the way of God. Unfortunately, the young emperor dies a few months after his arrival, but Bréhaine, because he had loved the boy, decides that it is his duty to send missionaries to Vietnam so that they can come to know God. Believing himself to be close to death, Bréhaine does not go on the trip himself, but instead sends a number of Dominican monks and nuns, led by a Brother Dominic. And so opens the first couple of chapters of an eighty-seven page novella that will encompass several years.

As with his novella Absinthe, Annam is written in such a style that the reader can feel him or herself sink into the sands of history and experience the verdant greenery of Vietnam, the horrendous humidity that bore down on the heavily clothed monks and nuns, and the liberation that they feel being in a completely foreign land away from the strictures of their former society.

With almost no dialogue, Bataille paints a portrait of men and women casting aside everything of their former lives to discover the things that are truly essential within their beings and with each other.

There is a dreamy otherworldly quality in the work of Christophe Bataille, the kind of quality that intrigues and seduces our sensibilities. Here the story is about some monks and nuns who leave France just before the revolution to travel by ship to Vietnam. Ultimately this is a love story, a sweet and tender tale of the spirit becoming flesh in a far off land where creepers creep and the rain is incessant and where everywhere there is greenery. There is a lyrical quality in Bataille's prose, something like poetry that pleases the eye and the ear even in translation. Perhaps some of that is due to the sensitive work of translator Richard Howard.

Bataille tells a story with simplicity. He tells it chronologically but tersely with just a stroke of color here and there, a bit of dialogue, a snatch of inner monologue, and from time to time a little catching up of details not previously mentioned. He begins with a child emperor from Vietnam who has come to France to implore Henry XVI to help his father the Prince Regent regain his position of power taken from him by a peasant's revolt. But the strange child, who became a toy of "bored courtiers hungry for novelty" is ineffectual and dies of pneumonia.

And then we have the former Bishop of Adran, who had been taken with the child, commission two ships to sail to Vietnam to bring salvation to the heathens there; and so we have our main set of characters, a small group of Dominican clergy and nuns who brave the long and tortuous voyage to eventually arrive at the city of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. And after some long years we have Brother Dominic and Sister Catherine living in utter simplicity as peasants in the highlands of Vietnam in a place called Annam.

This is a tale that emphasizes the earthy quality of life, the spirituality that comes with living a life of Zen-like simplicity in contrast to the world of affairs of church and state and war and trade. It is a search for a return to the Garden of Eden. On another level this tale hints of a world to come with France as a colonial power in Vietnam and then as France removed.

The book is short, 87 pages. Temporally speaking it is like a novel as each paragraph and the space between consume so much of time, and yet it is like a short story in its compression of the lives and times of its characters. Bataille is a fine talent and I will read more of his work.

Christophe Bataille was awarded the "Prix du Premier Roman" (Prize for the First Novel) in 1993 for this novella whose subject is one of the earlier French expeditions to what would be called Indochina. The expedition left France just before the French Revolution of 1789, and it was composed of elements of the "sword and the cross," that is, the military and Church. The novella is only 87 pages, and can be read in a couple of hours.

I had a personal interest in the story, having visited Vietnam on four occasions, one being an "all-expenses paid government trip," under not very favorable circumstances, that lasted a year, in 1968. After all, at some level, it was the lifestyle (and yes, geopolitical power) of 40,000 French "colons" (who had collaborated with Japan in WW II) that led the United States to this country half way around the world. So, how really did France establish its presence there?

Although Bataille provides deft and incisive descriptions of the expedition, and its principals, the novella is a mish-mash jumble of the true historical facts. For example, the principal organizer of the expedition in question, Pierre Pigneau de Brehaine did not die in France, not knowing the fate of the expedition, as Bataille has it in the novella, but rather in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, in 1799, many years after he supposedly died. As for Prince Nguyen Canh, who in real life, did visit the court at Versailles, in 1787, but did NOT die in France, as Bataille has it, but rather successfully returned to Vietnam, and waited more than a decade to die, in 1801, at the age of 21. Very significant changes from the historical record, and I could see no conceivable artistic reason that would support it. Historical novels do enter into the realm of the imagination, and I am all for that, provided the narrative is grounded on the historical facts, as they are generally understood to be. I also suspect that Bataille, at the age of 21 when he wrote the novella, had never visited Vietnam, and thus numerous aspects of the geography are "fuzzy," from areas that are cold when they should not be, as well as a depiction of a journey to the Central Highlands, that did not conform to the topography, nor the inhabitants (the Montagnards) that would be found there.

A prize given too early in life? Yes, it definitely seems so. Wouldn't it have been far better to have encouraged a meticulous adherence to the actual historical facts, and then let the imagination loose, with the expedition remnants, who were both initially of "the cloth" finding solace in the pleasures of the flesh, during the monsoons that were drenching Kontum? Regrettably, only 2-stars.

Bataille's writing is simple, the words succinct, and the message is clear. Witnessing the transformation of the missionaries as they spent years away from their home country was impressive. Still, I felt as though there was a lack of character development which made it difficult for me to fully appreciate this transformation. Perhaps if I would have read this book as a long poem vs. a novel I would have felt a greater connection.