Novel without a Name @ richardeward.com

Novel without a Name
by Duong Thu Huong
from Penguin (Non-Classics)

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• Absolutely Horrible
  I'd like to start off with a disclaimer. Everyone feels that this books is a stunning portrayal of the horrors of war and the toll this has on normal people, that the author was punished for daring to pen such a momentous work, and that the author uses beautiful language. All of those things are absolutely true. And none of those things make this horrible book worth reading. The narrator of this book, who seems to be suffering from sorrows in his childhood as well as the miseries of war, does nothing but... more info

• "That ideal, well, the kids need it. And it's all we need to turn them into monks, soldiers, or cops."
  Fiction possesses (among other things) the brilliant quality of putting us in somebody else's shoes, and that in a manner as moving and eye-opening as it is safe and temporary. Still, in very few novels indeed could this quality be more urgently called for than in Duong Thu Huong's "Novel Without a Name" ("Tieu Tuyet Vô De", 1991). Certainly this nameless novel of war and its terrible costs--death and destruction, certainly, but also the disruption and interruption of lives, ravaging of hopes and... more info

• NOVEL WITHOUT A NAME
  "NOVEL WITHOUT A NAME" by Duong Thu Huong is about a soldier fighting for the ideals of Communism. He is in fact, a Viet Cong officer and has been fighting the war for 10 years. His decade of fighting, killing, and watching his life slowly fade away causes him to become jaded and a disbeliever in the "great cause."
  His feelings of patriotism are eventually covered with the dust of hatred and disillusionment. His entire life begins to focus on his childhood, and the love of his mother. "Quan" is 28... more info

• Terse vivid prose unfurls a war story from the other side
  
  It should be noted that Duong Thu Huong has done prison time for her writings.
  How interesting to see the other side of the same Vietnam War coin and find such vivid prose delineating a story of endless sacrifice, party corruption and bitter cynicism.
  U.S. soldiers had 13 month tour of duty. The North had as long as it took- 15 years in the hero's case.
  She writes expertly and hammers together a story of one man's experience of the war moving full circle from party ideologue to spent... more info

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