Customer Reviews

Night, Again

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This collection of short stories by Vietnamese writers from within the country as well as abroad contains some original pieces that push the limits of Vietnamese fiction. Some stories, however, express the typical Vietnamese penchant for nostalgia such as Duong Thu Huong's "Reflections of Spring" and Bao Ninh's "A Marker on the Side of the Boat. Other stories are obviously wry social criticisms such as Le Minh Khue's "Scenes from an Alley." I found Tran Vu's story "Gunboat on the Yangtze" most original stylistically and very bold in its deft portrayal of the morally sensitive subject of incestuous love, pain, and guilt. The story is complex and forces one to question one's own morality when reading the sensuous passages that one is afraid to admit are stimulating. I also liked Do Kh.'s story "The Pre-War Atmosphere" with it's fresh pairing of a Vietnamese character, the husband, with a Lebanese one, the wife in a contemporary setting that is outside of Vietnam, Orange County in this case. In its closing lines the story offers, with a hint of self-critical irony, a criticism of the tiresome Vietnamese idealistic longing for the past: "Enough of soaking in that pre-war atmosphere. Let's not abuse it. Think about the past enough to amuse yourself, but don't retch over it. Home or exile, that sour vomit smell can't be made fragrant with mood music."

In this collection from Seven Stories Press, Linh Dinh has collected together twelve works of fiction by Vietnamese writers. Some of these works are quite sharp, like Nguyen Thi Am's "Sleeping on Earth," a story that by itself is worth the sticker price of this book. Other stories, like The Giang's "A stagnant Water Place," are inventive, but ultimately unfulfilling.

But I do applaud Linh Dinh for the scope of this collection--in this, he puts together works from both literary and popular authors. Though Vietnam is clearly a place torn in its artistic identity (as we learn in the introduction, one of Vietnam's most famous writers, Duong Thu Huong, is banned), this collection is a good intro to let you learn of some names that hopefully will be a little more available in English in the near future (and they are--check Amazon for Nguyen Huy Thiep, Thu Huong Duong and others). Linh Dinh set out to expose a new landscape in literature, and his collection certainly does that.

I have yet to read a short story anthology that doesnt have its forgettable entries but the standouts here make "Night, Again" a truly great read. Le Minh Khue's "Scenes From an Alley" is a short, matter-of-fact account of extreme poverty and child abuse that builds to a haunting finale and Nguyan Huy Thiep's miniature epic family drama "Without a King" manages to be both sprawling and finely detailed and at the same time clock in at under twenty pages. Thiep is a talented writer who deserves major attention and it's unfortunate that "The General Retires and Other Stories," an anthology of his shorter works translated into English, is currently out of print and difficult to locate. As mentioned in other reviews Tran Vu's erotically-charged incest story "Gunboat on the Yangtze" is a particular standout. Overall, well worth the time for anyone looking for a different perspective.

A perfect entry into the soul of contemporary Vietnam. I ended up doing a photo essay on the country available here: [...]

It would not have been possible without Night Again's insights.

This book was published in 1996. The second edition, published in 2006, added one work each by Tran Ngoc Tuan and Duc Ban and was the version I read. It contained 14 short stories by as many authors. The pieces were published in Vietnamese between 1987 and roughly 2000; eight appeared here for the first time in English. The great majority were from the 1990s.

The oldest author was Nguyen Minh Chau (1930-89), who was called the earliest champion of Doi Moi (Renovation) in the country's literature. The youngest was Do Phuoc Tien (1966-).

The anthology introduced works by some of the foremost champions of Doi Moi literature or debunkers of socialist utopias (Nguyen Minh Chau, Duong Thu Huong, Le Minh Khue) as well as the one called the most influential for his use of language (Nguyen Huy Thiep) and one of the most popular (Bao Ninh). Others were from both the north and south, including six who live abroad, in Europe or the United States.

A number of the stories could be described as somber realism. They showed the effects of poverty and materialism that made people behave badly -- either straightforwardly, as in the pieces by Nguyen Thi Am and The Giang, or satirically, in the one by Le Minh Khue. One by Duong Thu Huong showed a civil servant looking back over his life and regretting choices made. Others showed the dislocation of war, as in the story by Bao Ninh set during wartime that referenced a Vietnamese folktale, and one by Nguyen Minh Chau that showed a character suffering from a wartime injury, which was probably based on his own life.

Other authors (Do Khiem, Duc Ban, Pham Thi Hoai, Tran Ngoc Tuan, Do Phuoc Tien) were more interested in cryptic formal experimentation or plumbing their own subjectivity. Their pieces included rambling reminiscences of an exile, a woman's recounting of a series of lovers, or various memories of a village and its people, or a narrator's feverish adventures. Many of this type were narrated in the first person. They must have marked a great departure from government-approved writing before 1987, but most of them were for me flat and self-indulgent. The best of this type, in my opinion, was the story by Tran Vu about incest between a sister and brother, told from the woman's point of view, mixing sensuality, love and madness.

Another story enjoyed, by Mai Kim Ngoc, was in the form of a monologue by an old hospital émigré in the United States, looking over his life and describing his first experience with a prostitute and his mixed feelings.

Introspection, was, in my opinion, handled most skillfully -- or in a way I could understand -- by Duong Thu Huong, Tran Vu and Mai Kim Ngoc.

I was impressed by the range of authors included and wish I could've enjoyed an even greater number of the stories, since I found the formally experimental or very subjective ones uninteresting. The capsule biographies of the authors, the compiler's introduction and information on publication dates were appreciated.

Other English-language anthologies for Vietnam include Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction (1986), War and Exile: A Vietnamese Anthology (1989; hard to find), The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction from Vietnamese and American Writers (1995), Vietnam: A Traveler's Literary Companion (1996), and Love after War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (2003). An anthology for Southeast Asia that contains four good stories by Vietnamese writers is Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia (2002).