Memories of Pure Spring [Hardcover]

Phan Huy Duong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1st edition (January 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786865814
• ISBN-13: 978-0786865819
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,933,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gripping drama on human rights, January 24, 2000

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories of Pure Spring (Hardcover)

Though the War with the Americans engulfs the country, music composer Hung and his beloved wife singer Suong are happy. They enjoy working together as they entertain the troops with Suong singing Hung's compositions. When the war ends, Hung's friends drop him when he complains about the failure of the redistribution of the wealth among the people.

By accident, Hung ends up with boat people fleeing Viet Nam. However, the police catch the dissidents and send them to a re-education camp. Upon "graduating", Hung finds he remains a no man, turning to alcohol to survive and driving his cherished wife further away from him.

MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING is a potent indictment of the misuse of power by the Communists when they united Viet Nam. The story line creates as powerful a human rights defender as one will see in a novel. The prime characters are intriguing and enlightening, but their soliloquies slow down the plot. Though the tale may lose some of its lyrical beauty in the translation, Duong Thu Huong shows why she is considered the Vietnamese voice of conscience.

Harriet Klausner

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful but Tragic Story, May 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Memories of a Pure Spring (Mass Market Paperback)

This story combines ill fortune and personal tragedy that bring a noble soul to sorrow or ruin. In modern literature, tragedy like this is rare. The hero must live and prosper because Hollywood heroes always do. Not tragedy, but romance always reigns. Memories of A Pure Spring is a tragedy in the classical sense. Huong will take you through many tragedies in this story, but the way that they are told makes you want to keep reading.
Huong takes us on an emotionally intense journey, both in a political sense and a personal sense. The political sense appears throughout the entire story as it takes place during and after the Vietnam War. Suong, a young singer, marries Hung, a theater director older than she. Hung is removed as leader of the artistic troupe in a demonstration of the pettiness of arbitrary political power. Then we are brought to the political mess in the heart of the re-education camp. As you read, you begin to feel pity for the characters, but it is not the type of story that depresses you because you find yourself wondering what will happen next. Suong's attempt at suicide, Hung's addiction to alcohol and drugs, and Hung's constant struggle for artistic success all make the story more interesting to read. Sure the story has a few good things that happen, and although they create some happy moments, the emotions that the characters go through and the emotions you as the reader feel, are all inspired more by the tragedy that the characters are experiencing.
This book is written beautifully with lots of imagery and description. As you read, Huong's words constantly make you see or feel something, for example the sea: "It had no country, no fatherland, no nationality, that the sea was free...that belonged to no one else, that answered to no one, that was no one's slave"(99). Hung, the director, is inspired by the sea, and this description of the sea is now how Hung must write his music: "in a different light, in the howl of the sea, of freedom." Huong could have chosen to simply explain how Hung was now free from writing for the troupe. Instead she uses the beautiful metaphor to explain it. She uses metaphors and similes like this throughout the entire story. For example, she uses a neat simile to describe happiness. "It was a small, modest happiness, like a drop of honey that you spread on the tongue of a newborn babe." We are not just told that someone is happy, we are also told the type of happiness and to what extent. These descriptive words and metaphors throughout the entire book make it much more fascinating to read. The tragic events that are occurring are explained with such beauty that they create images and feelings within you that keep you wanting to continue to read.
The only weakness that I find about the story is that it has shifting time periods. Throughout the entire story we shift from past to present quite often. The shifts do not take place just at the beginning of chapters, but everywhere. They are not marked or distinguished in any special way. Sometimes you do not even realize you have shifted until you have read a few paragraphs. Huong, however, did throw in a big hint that helps at times which is the use of symbols. One symbol that is especially helpful is the ylang ylang flower. Huong uses the flower at different times in the story to symbolize a memory one of the characters is having. This is helpful at times and is a neat hint, but it does not occur at every time shift. These time shifts do cause confusion but they in no way ruin the story. They just make the story more challenging to read. The text is written in a way that is very easy to understand. The story is not at all difficult to read as long as you can work through the shifts from past to present. This is the only weakness that I discovered throughout my reading and most people might not even call it a weakness, but a challenge.
I really enjoyed reading Memories of A Pure Spring. Any reader who enjoys a book about love, and life after war, will enjoy this story. Of course not many people enjoy reading about tragedy, but the way it is written helps you to get past the tragedy and enjoy the story. It does not have the action-packed excitement of a horror story, but the beautiful description and whirl-wind of love and tragedy keeps you reading and wanting to know what more could happen next. This is not a story that I would normally read, but I am glad that I did and I would recommend it to anyone.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars an impressive writer, but I think that this must be a bad translation, November 10, 2006

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories of a Pure Spring (Mass Market Paperback)

I have read other works by Duong Thu Huong, and those works inspired me to pick up this novel. Knowing that her work is banned in her home country was also incentive to check out more of her stuff.

This novel is chock full of social commentary and the brutality of man against man, but I can't help but think that this was a less than adequate translation of her work. Othertranslations I had read of other pieces presented her style as direct and unabashed, revealing the worst and best of her characters in an unfiltered, honest way. There is much of that philosophy in this book, but the sentences themselves became rather convoluted and sometimes just downright poor in grammar. I would prefer NOT sounding like an English teacher when discussing literature, but when the writing can't seem to sort itself out to let the matter within speak, then reading becomes more of a chore than a pleasure.

I strongly recommend many of Duong Thu Huong's work, but I would suggest avoiding this one. Perhaps one day a more competent translation will come out.