Night, Again

June 3, 1996
In the six years since Vietnam's cultural "renovation" or Doi Moi, readers around the world have finally gotten access to many of the country's most gifted and prominent authors. Night, Again collects a dozen of these often censored and sometimes imprisoned writers, such as the extraordinary Bao Ninh (The Sorrows of War), whose "A Marker on the Side of the Boat" alone makes this collection worth reading. Other highlights include work by Nguyen Huy Thiep, Duong Thu Huong, and Nguyen Minh Chau, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese Army who died from his exposure to chemical defoliants. Night, Again is not a collection of pretty stories with happy endings, but one that reflects the hardships and unfairness of life in general, and of devastated Vietnam in particular. One is always aware of how different this culture is, but lyrical language and carefully rendered characters make these stories universal. As Linh Dinh states in his introduction: "the soul of any literature lies in its relationship to the vernacular." Night, Again is an interesting cross section of life, love, loss and redemption. Although not as powerful as last year's The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese & American Writers (Curbstone Press), this collection can still unite readers from the U.S. and Vietnam after decades of discord.

July 1, 1996
Where other translations of Vietnamese literature--Bao Ninh's "Sorrow of War," Duong Thu Huong's "Paradise of the Blind" or "Novel without a Name," or the American anthology "The Other Side of Heaven"have circulated, this short story collection is likely to find readers. (Eight of the collection's 12 stories are published for the first time in English here.) The stories' authors--Nguyen Thi Am, Bao Ninh, Duong Thu Huong, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Le Minh Khue, Do Phuoc Tien, The Giang, Pham Thi Hoaih, Mai Kim Ngoc, Tran Vu, Do Kh, and Nguyen Minh Chau--include major figures in the history of Vietnamese literature as well as newer voices from the generation born during the '60s. Some still live in their homeland; others, including editor Dinh (who also supplies a helpful introduction), live and work in the U.S. or Europe. War is inevitably one motif of these stories, but Doi Moi has allowed at least some writers to consider Bloody Marys and belly dancing as well as bombs and burning flesh in their fiction. Definitely worth considering. ((Reviewed July 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)