In the last ten years, Vietnam has come awkwardly back into ordinary international life, obliged by the profound changes that have taken place in the world to shed its pose of defiant isolation.

Before 1945, Vietnam had all the allure of an emerging modern culture, with something cosmopolitan and something French added to its far older East and South Asian traditions. These tantalizing prospects were soon to be buried, unable to survive in either a garrison or a police state. For 30 years of war between 1945 and 1975, and for at least a decade thereafter, Vietnam became a country that prided itself on drabness and austerity, and seemed determined never again to become enticing.

As we now know, the Vietnamese had among the worst of all Communist experiences. True, Central Europeans were forced to endure the horrors of Stalinist rule, but their own young were not sent off on decades of quixotic and self-destructive military adventures. Even when compared to China and North Korea during their periods of high madness, Communist Vietnam seemed driven by a particularly demonic energy which ended by destroying millions of hapless subjects through war and repression. Only the Cambodians fared worse.

So, if we are now beginning to see some stirring of normality in Vietnam—a new receptivity to international commerce, a bit of cultural creativity, an embryonic human-rights movement of a sort once commonplace in Central Europe—the first wonder, as in Dr. Johnson’s old phrase, is not that the thing is being done well, but that it is being done at all. A second thought also occurs: to judge by recent literary works, we may be witnessing in Vietnam a human analogue to the reappearance of flora in forests once totally devastated by fire and given up for lost.

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Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Hong1 and The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh2 have appeared in English at almost the same moment; but they have more in common than that circumstance alone. Their authors, both now in their late forties, were close witnesses to the phase of the Indochina wars that ended in 1975. Miss Duong was a young theatrical performer, a member of a youth brigade sent to the front to boost the morale of North Vietnam’s first-line combatants. Bao Ninh was an actual fighter, one whose 500-man infantry brigade had melted away to ten survivors by war’s end. Each writer, by virtue of these credentials, could have enjoyed an honored existence in post-1975 Vietnam; but each opted otherwise.

Duong Thu Hong’s experience is perhaps the more complex, and not only because she happens to be a woman. Her first efforts as a writer in the late 1980’s seem to have been the products of a kind of “hundred flowers” thaw. Embarking on a policy of economic liberalization, the regime appealed for the support of disenchanted intellectuals by permitting a relaxation in cultural policy. But, as in the Soviet Union and China in earlier generations, the regime got more than it bargained for.

We do not know all the stages in Miss Duong’s process of deconversion but, by the end of the decade, she had published three novels, all depicting Vietnamese society in bitter terms. Paradise of the Blind (1988; English edition 1993) is the only one of these well-known in the West; it is the story of a young woman who has served as one of the tens of thousands of Vietnamese “export workers” in the Soviet Union and whose disillusionment comes about through close observation of post-1975 Vietnam’s “new class.”

Duong Thu Hong’s novels were at first acclaimed but, in a pattern reminiscent of what happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, they eventually got her expelled from the Communist party. In 1991, she spent several months under arrest. Her writings now occupy a kind of no-man’s-land, not formally banned, not freely available, either. From all this comes Novel Without a Name, a work more powerful than Miss Duong’s earlier ones and the first to deal with the master subject of her time, the Vietnam war. It is a first-person account, told by a man, and thus marks a significant departure from her earlier works with their woman’s perspective.

The young narrator has seen a decade of war. “Ten years ago,” he reminisces, “we had wanted to sing songs of glory. Anything was good for killing, as long as it brought us glory.” Now, war comes back to him in dreams, in hallucinations, in visions of walking vultures that remind him of “villages razed to ash, strewn with swollen corpses, of the gorges that swam with blood and rotting flesh; of the stench of death, the buzzing of flies.”

How the narrator arrives from then to now is the burden of Miss Duong’s story. One moment in particular stands out: during a train ride in wartime Vietnam, our narrator, then a soldier, overhears the chatter of two high-ranking officials, out to see how the masses are living. As they muse about what is required to extract a greater effort from this “nation of imbeciles,” who “need a religion to guide them and a whip to educate them,” the young man has a political epiphany. He sees himself as a marionette, held like countless others in the thrall of a malign puppeteer:

Billions of lives wait for the signal to jump into the fire, into hell. . . . I am one of them, they are my kin, all those who are dear to me. . . . And seated behind this curtain, I see this little man with his pug nose, grinning, puffing on a cigarette.

Duong Thu Hong’s telling of her tale is skillful, immersing us fully in the scary, the repulsive, and the grotesque. Crossing easily between the real and the surreal, her novel draws on traditional Vietnamese conventions of storytelling in which the line between the animate and the inanimate is often blurred, in which trees and rocks and machines have living innards—souls, as it were—that can and do separate themselves from their hosts.

Similarly blurred in much traditional Vietnamese literature, in a manner exploited by Miss Duong here, is the line between life and death. As in Chinese opera, Japanese Noh, or Javanese puppet theater, death is not the end of things: there is a relation between our present life and “other” life that is part and parcel of the nature of the world. Whether or not Miss Duong actually believes in these notions, they provide her with a resonant way of interpreting novelistically the last 50 years of Vietnamese history, especially when it comes to depictions of battle and war.

They also provide her with the structureless structure of her book. The story she tells does not have a beginning, a middle, or an end in the normal sense, for in and of themselves the war experiences she recounts rob us of any workaday apprehension of the rational ordering of things. As readers, we become guerrilla fighters: advancing and retreating, withdrawing and reflecting, regrouping and rearming, all the while losing any sense of what the war we are fighting is or was ever about.

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Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is in many respects a close sibling of the story told in Novel Without a Name, and it is remarkably similar in the feeling it evokes and the manner in which it evokes it. Even its publishing history is analogous. Once again, the Hanoi regime took a while to realize what this book was “really” about. When first published, it circulated widely throughout the country, but it is now under a de-facto interdict—not officially proscribed, not reprintable.

The title does not mislead: this is indeed a sorrow-filled tale of “thirty years of war . . . so many lives, so many fates.” The narrator and the few survivors of his brigade were among those present in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the last day of the war. But, as he recalls the event years afterward, even at the time they did not experience that soaring and brilliant happiness they would later see depicted in films about the fall of the city. In part, this book represents the author’s effort to comprehend why that should be so.

Unlike Novel Without a Name, The Sorrow of War is very much a writer’s book, and indeed one of its leitmotifs concerns the way it has itself come to be composed—the narrator tells of discovering a manuscript which, in addition to containing the story we are now reading, also includes reflections on how the story was created. This self-conscious, perhaps too self-conscious introspection substitutes in the novel for any overtly political discussion. In Bao Ninh’s version of the Vietnam war, Communists and Americans alike are confined to an almost arbitrary invisibility.

With politics in the background, the foreground is filled with pretty rough stuff. Even by the conventions of war novels, The Sorrow of War is horribly graphic: things which catch fire really burn, and nothing is spared either verbally or emotionally in conveying what happens when superheated metal, propelled from guns at very high speeds, collides with human flesh.

In Bao Ninh’s hands the sorrow of war encompasses as well the sorrow of love. Central to his story is a matter of the heart: the unconsummated love of the narrator and his high-school sweetheart. It is only after their failed postwar reunion that we learn the harrowing tale of how they were separated. The young woman had followed her lover on his way to the front, only to lose him at the last moment. Although she lives out the war in safety, she, like him, suffers the destruction of any capacity for normal life and love. They are, each of them, casualties twice over, and when the irreparable force of this fact is brought home to the narrator of Bao’s book, it has all the impact on him—and on his readers—that the encounter with the new Vietnam’s cynical officials has on the narrator of Novel Without a Name.

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Indeed, this beautiful young woman—enchanting, daring, poignantly resigned to her fate—is in a sense a connecting thread between the two novels: one can readily imagine her surviving the war to become, years later, the disillusioned heroine of Paradise of the Blind, and then the author of Novel Without a Name itself. But it is that shared quality of seemingly stoical acceptance which deserves another moment’s reflection.

The survivors who narrate these two books seem the very embodiment of a near-stereotypical Asian stolidity in the face of adversity. But we should not be misled by the apparent impassiveness of Duong Thu Hong and Bao Ninh into thinking that the anger they share with their compatriots has been exhausted. Throughout the centuries, Vietnamese have taken delight in tales of the many ways those wrongfully injured in this world are able to turn the tables on their tormentors, even if they must return from the next world in order to do it. In life, the aggrieved may be powerless, unable to harm anyone; but “dead and vengeful,” in the words of one 17th-century tale, “they are suffused with power and danger. A hungry ghost can roam the village for generations, impossible to placate, impossible to exorcise.”

Both these books are filled with the ghosts and spirits of people deeply wronged. So the politicians in today’s Hanoi who are taking steps to suppress such works know what they are doing. These politicians, after all, are as familiar with the traditional stories as are the humblest peasants: the stories of evil generals, corrupt ministers, and lecherous officials who brutalize the poor, conscript their sons, despoil their daughters, and engage in vainglorious imperial expeditions. The vengeful spirits always rise up, and always return, and always exact retribution.

1 Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. Morrow. 292 pp. $23.00.

2 Translated by Phan Thanh Hao. Pantheon. 233 pp. $21.00.

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