Novel Without a Name

In one riveted sitting over the weekend, I read Duong Thu Huong / Dương Thu Hương's excellent Novel Without a Name (1995, translated into English by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson). Set in Vietnam, it shows the war through the eyes of Quan, a North Vietnamese infantry captain. The immediate narrative takes place just before the capture of Saigon in April 1975, but through memory flashes, the narrator dips back to childhood and to various episodes of his past ten years' experience as a soldier; through dreams/nightmares, it gets at the psychic and physical costs of protracted trauma. As befits the narrator's condition and the overall context, Novel Without a Name often seems hallucinatory, surreal, and horrifying -- yet is sometimes beautiful, too.

What this work gave me was a better feel for the Vietnamese and wartime deprivations. Little details stick with me -- soldiers hunting and gathering food on an almost constant basis, having to eat anything from orangatang soup (which grosses Quan out as much as it would me) to lichen. Survivors of frequent American and South Vietnamese aerial bombing, the VC and North Vietnamese are always diving for shelter in underground bunkers and rubble. They are almost always tired, hungry, sick and shell-shocked. But they keep fighting, tapping into an ancient primal resilience and a long tradition of driving out foreign invaders. Their memories are long; their endurance, mind-blowing.


This pie chart (source: http://www.rationalrevolution.net/) gives an idea of the disparity in casualties for the 1964-1975 war cycle. In the USA, we hear plenty about American casualties and very little about the Vietnamese side. This wild disparity is also reflected in books and movies released in the States. But the Vietnamese were/are not yowling faceless hordes coming out of the jungle like demons -- they were and are, believe it or not, every bit as human as anyone else. Novel Without a Name helps begin to redress the balance, and as with Yin and Yang, we do need that.

Duong Thu Huong (n. 1947), by the way, is a woman and veteran of the Vietnam-American War and the Sino-Vietnamese War. Because of her candor and independence of mind, Novel Without a Name has been banned by the Vietnamese government. In the United States where we are free to publish and read just about anything, Novel Without a Name is mostly just ignored or unheard of.