Customer Reviews

The Man from Saigon: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Among the wonders of America's Civil War literature was Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage." The author never saw a battle. I am stunned by how vividly Marti Leimbach has captured the horrific detail of combat and social disruption in Southeast Asia during the 1960's. One might conclude that at some point in her career she served with the Rangers in Vietnam, and the Army Nursing Corp., and managed to squeeze in a couple of years as a war correspondent, all the while carousing in Saigon bars and working as a hyper-observant sociologist and jungle ecologist. The research she put into "The Man from Saigon" is absolutely astonishing! Ms. Leimbach teaches creative writing at Oxford University, and her students are fortunate indeed to study with such a gifted author.

"The Man from Saigon" is the best novel I've read in years. From start to finish I couldn't set it down... and it is not a "quick read." I long ago lost interest in reliving the wars of Southeast Asia, and I'm not very attracted to love stories. I love outstanding writing, however, and I love this novel. The twists of plot, the realism, the complex characters, the attention to gritty detail, the frequent surprises of observation, the exploration of human emotions and behaviors, and above all the pure quality of craftsmanship, cover to cover. It is an adventure, a romance, a slice of histoty, a brilliant novel.

The Man From Saigon is one of the best books I've read this year. It made the fear, stench, and horror of the Viet Nam War come alive. Some of the battle scenes are the most riveting and terrifying I've come across in a long time. Sometimes I had to put the book down and rest before I could go on.The story was told from a different angle than most Viet Nam books and was totally unpredictable.I loved this book and recommend it for anyone that enjoys a real page turner and an honest account of war. Everyone, please read this book. You will not be disappointed and you'll never forget it!!!!

The Vietnam War meant different things to different people because they cane to the war in very different ways. Some entered it, kicking and screaming, via the nerve-wracking military draft of the sixties, and a few joined up in order to avoid the prison time they deserved. Others, for reasons of their own, volunteered to join the fight. But, even then, common foot soldiers saw the war through eyes very different from those of the career officers who led them. Nurses, doctors and journalists had yet another Vietnam War experience - and, then, there were those rare female journalists who experienced something else altogether different.

Marti Leimbach's latest novel, "The Man from Saigon," tells the story of one of those female reporters, Susan Gifford, a woman who came to Vietnam to write special interest stories for a women's magazine but could not resist the dangerous pull of going into the field with her fellow reporters, a decision she would often regret after it was too late to do anything about it. Susan's willingness to place herself in harm's way would eventually lead to her capture (along with Son, her Vietnamese photographer) by three North Vietnamese soldiers who would march her deep into the jungle in search of the unit from which they had become separated prior to stumbling upon Susan and Son.

"The Man from Saigon," though, is about more than the trauma associated with chaotic firefights and ambushes by enemy soldiers. It is about personal relationships and how those relationships are shaped and changed when the constant possibility of a brutal, and sudden, death hangs over one's head for months at a time. The novel explores the willingness of those who place themselves in that kind of situation to live all aspects of their lives on the edge. Needless to say, romance seldom plays much of a role in the practical relationships that often develop inside a war zone.

Susan finds herself involved with two very different men: a physical relationship with a married network news broadcaster who has been in-country for some twenty-nine months and a friendly relationship with the Vietnamese photographer who shares her tiny apartment in Saigon between their trips into the field to cover the war. In a way, she loves both of them, and neither of them - but together they give her the emotional support she needs to survive her Vietnam experience.

Marti Leimbach offers an insightful look at the whole Vietnam War experience, but with a slightly different twist to it. As she puts it in the novel, "It feels to her (Susan) that the universal theme of this country is departure and loss. Everyone is always in the process of leaving. Everyone is dying or disappearing or going away or being sent home. You never got used to it."

Those readers who have read, or plan to read, the moving new Vietnam War novel, "Matterhorn," by Karl Marlantes will find that "The Man from Saigon" is a nice companion piece in the way it looks at the war from a completely different point-of-view, this time from the viewpoint of those paid to be there to tell the rest of us what was really happening there.

Leimbach's novel sweeps you away to a Saigon that most people have never heard about. She gives you the Vietnam war experience from a new perspective, full of details typically only available from diaries and biographies. You feel the grit, smell the jungle and hear the bombs.

Her characters are complete, human and vulnerable, and their story is compelling.

I couldn't put the book down, and I usually tend toward non-fiction.

This book was just too darn long, by at least a hundred pages. That said, I do think Marti Leimbach is a wonderful writer. Her characters are well drawn and fully fleshed out, particularly the two Americans, Susan Gifford and Marc Davis. The character who remains something of an enigma is the title character, Son, who is, presumably, a North Vietnamese spy working under cover as a press photographer. I'm not sure he really works as a character, simply because Leimbach is unable to ever get inside his skin and mind the way she does with her American journalists. Because of this, the ending lacks resolution. But the biggest problem with the book was its length. Perhaps one of Leimbach's biggest strengths in this book is the way she is able to evoke an atmosphere, a setting, an ambience. She makes you feel the ooze, hear the noise, smell the smells and the stench of both the jungle and the teeming streets of Saigon and the other Vietnam locales visited in the story. It is just about as real as it gets. The trouble is she keeps on doing this to death until you just want to scream, "OKAY! I GET IT! GET ON WITH THE STORY ALREADY!" The story itself is pretty straightforward. The girl reporter gets captured by the Vietcong and endures untold (well, actually told and toLD and TOLD) hardships, but is kinda looked after by Son, who is captured with her and who, she begins to realize, is not who she thought he was. The boy reporter (who is married) worries about her and tries to search for her, feeling vaguely guilty about his pregnant wife back in the states. And the wife situation is worked out in just a bit too pat a manner, if you ask me - a deus ex machina that simply isn't very believable. I'm not sure I could spoil this book, because there's not much to spoil. I recognized a good writer in Leimbach, but I was constantly frustrated by the way the plot dragged and the way the atmosphere was simply done to death. The storyline was just too simple and too thin to sustain itself for over 300 pages. A perceptive editor should have seen this. Maybe this story was just not right for Leimbach. I still think I might take a look at her previous novel, Daniel Isn't Talking. I'll bet it's a lot better than this one. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

Not really helpful but that's all I want to say. It's a realistic and unexpectedly wonderful read. I don't generally care for war novels.

I have been revisiting the Vietnam War in my reading and The Man from Saigon: A Novel is one of the newer pieces of fiction concerning that era. I have to honestly say that compared to others I have read lately, it is a good novel but not among the best.

The story reminded me too much of another book which I absolutely loved ~ the superb The Lotus Eaters: A Novel ~ a far superior novel over The Man from Saigon: A Novel in authenticity and emotional connection.

Although MAN FROM SAIGON is competently written, it is lacking in the emotional depth I needed to connect with its characters. The narrative, which could have been exciting and engaging considering the nature of its plot, is flat and one-dimensional. Even the writing style is a bit confusing ~ I was confounded as to why some of the dialogue was written in italics and the rest with traditional punctuation marks. This is a minor thing, true, and I did later figure out what the author was doing, but still my curious mind was more distracted by the awkward style rather than engaged in the narrative.

Even though I found much of The Man from Saigon: A Novel boring, it is overall a fairly decent read. Unfortunately, because I never connected with any of the stiff characterizations, I must give it a high 3 rating only.

Other excellent Vietnam War era books which I highly recommend:

The Lotus Eaters: A Novel

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam

The Things They Carried

The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Susan Gifford, female war correspondent in Vietnam is taken prisoner, along with her Vietnamese photographer, Son. THE MAN FROM SAIGON by Marti Leimbach is a well written story that is not only descriptive of what it is like in the jungles of Vietnam, but also the hardships of that war. It is also a love story (Susan and her married lover, Marc). I found I couldn't put the book down as they struggled on their march through the jungle. Quite an impressive novel.

The story, set in Vietnam a year before the Tet Offensive, has all the elements of a good page turner: interesting, well-rendered characters, profluent plot, a wide range of emotion and an accurate rendering of history. Like most good modern novels the reader is thrown into the thick of things with a riveting (almost literally) opening scene that introduces us to a feisty magazine reporter named Susan who has been sent there by her crusty editor to write articles of feminine interest. She soon meets a bold reporter named Marc whose influence pushes her from the relatively safe confines of Saigon to the frontlines. The romance that develops between them is as precarious as the conflict itself: Marc, who has become jaded by his many months in country, has a pregnant wife back in the States. The relationship is further complicated when Marc warns Susan about her friendship with a Vietnamese photographer named Son who may be more than he appears. The plot thickens when she and Son get captured by three Viet Cong and begin an arduous trek to the north.

Anyone wishing to know what the quixotic folly of Vietnam was like could not go wrong reading this finely wrought adventure. Marti Leimbach gives us perfect descriptions of that beautiful country's ruined splendor, accurately depicts the lies and deceit that occurred daily and chillingly details the senseless pain and suffering on both sides.

There has been criticism that the tale may be too lengthy with the profluence dragging in places, some of the plot twists lacking verisimilitude and the ending leaving a thread unresolved. One such critic, a fellow whose own military tale bores us with lengthy, scatological descriptions of beer fests in Germany, might consider that this is a novel and good novels don't often sail in safe harbors. And, like life, some situations go unresolved.

Michael D. Edwards, Author of the soon to be released "Royal Ryukian Blues" a memoir of Okinawa.

An absorbing, often gripping novel of a young woman reporter on tour in war-torn Vietnam in 1967, The Man from Saigon is gritty, realistic and poetically written. Leimbach is a master at describing the visceral: the humidity and heat of the jungle, the ache of hunger, the recoil of the body and the brain under fire, the insanity that comes from being surrounded by bombs falling for hours and bullets like hot rain.

The protagonist, Susan, works for a woman's magazine in Chicago and is sent to the war to gather human interest stories. She's not supposed to leave Saigon, but of course she does. She gets drawn in to the addiction of war reporting, inching ever closer to the heavy action while putting light years of distance between her and the `normalcy' of life back in the States--until life in the war zone becomes what's normal. Two men, the Vietnamese photographer of the book's title, and another reporter, an American, weave in and out of Susan's mental, emotional and physical existence in a country too far from home.

The images are often disturbing, but the insights into war and human frailty, love and courage are meaningful and intelligent. An excellent read.

-- Mary F. Burns,(Author of J-The Woman Who Wrote the Bible)for the Historical Novel Society Review, May 2010