Rambling but fascinating foray into little-charted territory: the trauma wrought by the Vietnam War on its “winners.”
In dissident Huong’s latest fiction set in postwar Vietnam (Beyond Illusions, 2001, etc.), a woman’s veteran husband, presumed dead, returns after a 14-year absence.
Mien leads an idyllic life in the rural village of Mountain Hamlet. Her second husband, Hoan, is a successful plantation owner and merchant who adores her and their son, Hanh. One day, however, Mien’s first husband, Bon, who left to go to war shortly after their marriage, turns up on the doorstep of Mien’s beloved house. His wartime ordeal has left Bon shattered, and the villagers, Communist administrators, and her own conscience pressure Mien into leaving Hoan and going back to live with Bon in his decrepit shack. (Mien never learns that Bon had married a Laotian woman during his wanderings.) Complicating matters is Bon’s sister Ta, a shiftless nymphomaniac with a brood of children who steal Bon’s meager possessions and food. The story alternates among Mien, Bon and Hoan as it recounts, in disjointed sections, Mien’s futile effort to readjust to the repellent, needy Bon, Bon’s horrific war experience (including an agonizing trek with the corpse of his beloved sergeant) and Hoan’s descent into a sordid world of urban prostitutes with a Mephistophelean friend as a guide. Lush description—a bit too metaphor-replete—makes the Vietnamese flora, fauna and cuisine enticingly real. Bon, aided by a coffee aphrodisiac, impregnates Mien. Though Mien, who still returns to her old home by day to care for her son, does not want to have the child, she gives birth to a deformed, stillborn infant, possibly as a result of Bon’s exposure to Agent Orange or her own attempts to induce a miscarriage. Despite much interior musing on matters of destiny and compulsion, the characters’ behavior often seems arbitrary and unmotivated. A provisionally happy ending redeems the principals, except for Bon, whose personal terrain will remain unpopulated: hence the title.
Rambling but fascinating foray into little-charted territory: the trauma wrought by the Vietnam War on its “winners.”Pub Date: April 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-6664-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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