Memories of a Pure Spring

Duong Thu Huong is a Vietnamese writer whose books have been banned in her country for her indictment of postwar Vietnam. Her book, Memories of a Pure Spring, is basically a political tract charging the Communist party for betraying its ideals or at least betraying the many people who joined the war motivated by youthful idealism. Many of these people clearly fell by the wayside as Vietnam restructured after the war and the opportunists jostled for power, in the process settling old scores. The family at the centre of the novel are one of the victims who emerge from the sacrifices of war only to find themselves marginalised and subtly persecuted. Hung is a music composer of repute who is unable to compromise with the new leadership and what they represent and Suong, his wife, is a central Vietnam girl with a golden voice who is forced to make compromises. Through them and a number of other characters, the author chronicles Hung's fall, both professionally and personally, as well as the effect of the war and its aftermath on the individual and the culture of the country. In itself, the subject of Vietnam during the war is interesting because one is subjected to so many American interpretations of the war. Hardly any from North Vietnam is available in translation. And though some of the book traverses familiar territory given that the documentation of the corruption, the absurdity and the daily compromise with truth of communist regimes is plentiful, its specificity to the Vietnamese situation is sufficiently new. But for one reason or the other I didn't find the story interesting enough, which was a pity given how much I had looked forward to reading this book. Huong is clearly a passionate person, she is imbued with the right sentiments (and not merely the correct ones required of one by the times one lives in), her heart is in the right place. For this one admires her. But the story itself is not subtle and the characters are often broad brush strokes, particularly Suong. Every point seems doubly underlined. There is much internal monologue meant to represent Hung's thoughts on all subjects (about on the level of Guru Dutt's fragile hyper emotionalism) which gets to be plain wearying. Indeed it is as if everyone is so overcome by the specificity of their feelings that both characters and author don't seem to possess ironic distance from their situation. Perhaps ironic distance is postmodern and sincerity is undervalued. But the novel does not possess the element that makes feeling transparent but lets one transcend the obvious. At one point, Hung is caught fleeing on a boat, he is not fleeing but merely caught up in the melee. Huong does not treat this as richly comic, which it is. Neither does she treat it as a single tragic and unnecessary event which presages Hung's downfall. It is just one of many incidents in a book crowded with incident. Huong is also not served well by the translation, I suspect her voice is direct, in translation it is merely banal and maudlin. The only evocative bit of the novel, for me, was the section on Hung's father and an older kind of Vietnamese life, which is not very much touched upon except to serve as a more tranquil past (it reminded me a bit of Scent of the Green Papaya).

This novel put me in mind of Half of a Yellow Sun (again by an author with her heart in the right place). In either case, I wanted to put down the book mid-way and turn to a non-fiction work on the wars in Biafra and Vietnam. The case may well be made for fictionalising one's political and social concerns for fiction is effective in illuminating the facts. But very many authors tend to take their lived experience (in Huong's case her lived experience is quite remarkable and her novel is perhaps more a roman à clef which would make it somewhat inaccessible to the foreign reader) or research and build up a body of facts and then find a tale to peg on it. Very often it doesn't work.

Books that insert actual facts into fiction fare even worse. Amitav Ghosh, for example, is a serial offender. Shadow Lines, his first novel, which uses a long buried newspaper headline as a central piece of the story, is arguably the best of his fiction because it is a spare book. Hungry Tide nearly drowned in its reams of data and Glass Palace had characters and plot that were hokum. To my mind, only one novel did an excellent job of mixing both fact and fiction, The French Lieutenant's Woman. Charles and Sarah's story is interleaved with factual accounts of Victorian life (these obviously relate to the novel) but it is first and foremost a novel - the facts serve the purpose of the novel and not vice versa. Then again, I was in my twenties when I read it and the memory may be of my own pure spring. I may feel differently if I re-read it.

A review of Duong's book here. In general, the novel seems to have been well received.