No Man's Land

This is a beautiful book. The characters hug your mind long after you finish the story. All politicians should read it as it is the best anti-war novel to come along in years.

How many people living in America or elsewhere have actually removed themselves from this war-weary time, when just or unjust its outcome has afflicted the human race in more ways than one? So is it a reader's blessing to dwell into Huong's No Man's Land without getting bogged down in human's abyss of deepest despair and forlornness? Because without prior knowledge or preconceived notion of the Viet-Nam conflict: he or she maybe able to escape the author's unmerciful portrait of life and subtle but inexorable allegories to today's Viet-Nam. While it is more refreshing that first time readers may not discern the political undertone in Duong Thu Huong's latest novel and enjoy its tranche de vie, a love-after-war novel that revolves around some half dozen principal characters, there is no escaping the larger picture for readers familiar with Viet-Nam and the author's background as a dissident writer, that her works have been banned and her prose considered underground literature in Viet-Nam. (1) However, it's misleading to even group this novel under the underground literature genre. Her evocative and poetic style is as rich and sanguine as any bourgeois writer competing and aspiring (on equal footing) to uplift the human spirit despite its bleak human condition. There is hardly a trace of bitterness in her prose. In fact one can detect Huong's incorrigible capitalist `dolce vita' oozing out of her characters' thoughts and actions, so much that it causes an embarrassment of riches and makes one wonder: is the original sin in socialism is to curb human tendency to live the good life? If it weren't for the fact that No Man's Land is a translated work, one would readily esteem it as a beautiful literary piece. Yet as it is, readers can only surmise and be amazed at how well the Vietnamese syntax and style are rendered (or embellished) in English, the exquisite prose flows so expressively and naturalizes it as quite as mainstream as any English writer would with his/her original literary de-rigueur tour-de-force, thank you. Albeit fluent and well-versed in Vietnamese, one would be hard-pressed to detect - especially at the skillful hand of translators - even at book-length work such as this, the cramped style of translation, except in a few minor instances, (where mung bean is translated as green bean, `chim lon' as pig bird instead as owl, bamboo shoots as bamboo, certain misrepresented ca dao or maxims etc.) which are too trivial to detract from such great work. Under Duong Thu Huong's vast panoramic landscapes (no doubt derive from her many first-hand tours of duty in the Annamite Cordillera) as well as the descriptive up-close and personal scenes, one gets the feeling of watching a director's masterpiece movie unfolds before one's eyes. The advantage of No Man's Land of course rests on the fact that readers could understand Huong's `stream of consciousness' narratives, which help us get in the minds of her characters much better than that of