Fallen Idols
Dissident writer Duong Thu Huong is one of Vietnam's most popular contemporary novelists, and the first to have her work translated into English. Yet she is forbidden to travel abroad, and her work has been banned in her own country. That her fiction is produced under an oppressive regime infuses her impressive debut novel, Beyond Illusions (Hyperion, $23.95), first published in 1987 and now appearing in English for the first time, with an increased sense of urgency.
Beyond Illusions tells the story of Linh, an idealistic young woman living in postwar Vietnam. She awakens one morning to realize that she can no longer stand her husband, Nguyen, who once had been someone she loved "more than my own life." Her revulsion toward Nguyen stems from his gradual ideological shift, which has transformed him from a progressive-minded academic to a hack journalist cranking out Communist Party propaganda for the corrupt government newspaper. Nguyen insists that his job is lucrative and enables him to support Linh and their daughter, Huong Ly, comfortably. But Linh finds her husband's new career indefensible and stubbornly yearns for the man she fell in love with. "Linh belonged to the generation born after the Revolution," Huong writes, "but her soul was steeped in its myths and the ideals that had won her over as a child."
Rather than make Linh a noble character and Nguyen merely a sellout, Huong complicates the story by revealing Nguyen's humanity and by having Linh betray her husband with an affair. She finds a lover in Tran Phuong, a handsome composer and artist who also seduces Nguyen with his intellect and charm -- and is similarly bound to disappoint Linh when his hypocrisy is revealed. At the start of their affair, though, Linh views her husband as "a vulgar journalist, a miserable liar" and her lover as a flawless man who "so obsessed her that the outside world was a blur."
Ultimately, Linh is forced to move "beyond illusions," beyond putting others on a pedestal. Huong charts her progress from a dependent woman to one who "would never again be able to follow anyone's path but her own." Although a few minor characters are mere caricatures -- Tran's wife, for instance, is shrill, nagging and unattractive -- Linh is a strong, intense woman whose determination in an era of fear and repression is astonishing.
Broken Dreams
Marriage is even more of a source of disillusionment for the protagonist of Gone (Henry Holt, $23), Irish writer Martin Roper's debut novel. Stephen, a Dubliner reminiscent of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, flees Ireland for New York City to escape the pain of his unhappy marriage, the grief caused by his 19-year-old sister's death from cancer and a recent wave of terror inflicted by members of a violent teenage gang, who repeatedly vandalize his already dilapidated house. He's a haunted man unable to find peace anywhere, and his wife just seems to make him feel worse. "Only three years married and the intimacy between us worn more than the wedding shoes that I only wore on Sundays," he says.
Like Huong's Linh, Stephen also seeks refuge in an obsessive affair that soon goes wrong. And like Joyce's alter-ego Dedalus, this Stephen is a restless, lonely outsider, never quite at home in Ireland. He is contemptuous of his parents, especially his estranged mother. He nurtures vague notions of himself as an artist and makes scattered attempts at writing fiction. He also possesses a brutal, caustic wit on matters ranging from religion to literature to sex. Belonging to an informal local book club, which he describes as "a dull Dublin version of the Bloomsbury set," he disgustedly dismisses the Cormac McCarthy novel he has just read as "Man's struggle with the Universe against an imponderable sunset."
It's somewhat troubling that Roper isn't especially kind to the women in his novel. Stephen's wife, Ursula, is domineering, cold and downright scary. A successful journalist, she constantly reminds her blue-collar husband of her superior intellect and salary. Stephen's lover in New York, an Icelandic artist named Holfy, proves just as controlling as his wife -- especially in bed. Passive and indecisive, Stephen can't really break away from either of them.
He relates his troubles in a staccato, anxious voice that serves the story well: "The windscreen wipers are exhausted with the rain. Don't crash. Just get there. I drive deeper into the city." (Spending time inside Stephen's neurotic head does feel toxic at times, though it's never boring.) Less concerned with plot than the interior, cacophonous workings of the mind, Roper has written one of the nastiest and most truthful modern novels about the cruelties and disappointments of love.
Totemic Tales
In Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter (Univ. of Nebraska, $26.95), the quasi-fictional follow-up to her 1997 autobiography, Delphine Red Shirt, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and a lecturer at Yale, has crafted a memoir that offers a detailed view into the everyday lives of Native Americans before (and after) the era of reservations. Part family history, part myth, it is made especially revealing by the lively, fantastic stories of Red Shirt's mother, Lone Woman, who tells of her own life in South Dakota and the plains of northern Nebraska as well as the life of her remarkable grandmother, a medicine woman called Turtle Lung Woman.
Like Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which seamlessly blended Chinese myths with tales of Kingston's family, Red Shirt's book is a blend of fact -- Lone Woman's stories, recorded and translated from Lakota by the author -- and fiction, or rather, tall tales (such as a conversation between a Lakota man and his wife, recounted verbatim when no one else was actually present to record their dialogue firsthand). "There was meaning in all things," Lone Woman says, expressing Turtle Lung Woman's belief that nothing is random, and that "things could tell their own stories. Their own legends about how they came to be."
Lone Woman describes her people's faith in the totemic power of animals, such as birds, turtles and horses, as well as buffalo, who were considered sacred, and coyotes, whose spirits were believed to be malevolent. The Lakota were highly superstitious; they believed that "if the owl hoots twice -- someone will die." She also sadly recalls the period in the 1930s when the tribe was issued gifts of food, clothing, blankets and farm equipment by the U.S. government in exchange for the land they were forced to give up.
Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter suffers not from uninteresting material but from a lack of structure. In recording her mother's stories, Red Shirt failed to edit out many redundant passages, so that details in one section oddly repeat a chapter or so later. Despite that, these legends and histories, related in spare but eloquent language, are fascinating throughout.
Unchained Witness
Kate McCafferty's Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (Viking, $24.95) revisits the late 17th century and the decades following Elizabeth I's reign, when the British Empire shipped off thousands of Irish men, women and children to the Caribbean islands to be traded by slave merchants. It's told in the voice of Cot Daley, a headstrong young Irish woman "testifying" about her time as a slave in Barbados.
Cot's narrative is told to Peter Coote, a disgruntled British doctor serving the island's governor. He interrogates Cot about her role in a revolt against plantation owners organized by Irish and African slaves; she agrees to cooperate with Coote provided that she can also tell her life story to him: "That it be full testimony," she says. "That you record everything I say, not simply what you seek." She insists that the transcript of her interview fully record the atrocities of slavery.
Because the events of the novel unfold in retrospect, the perspective is awkward and distancing for the reader, as well as tiresome. Worse, the dialogue is stilted and overwrought. Cot lectures her interrogator on the evils of racism and earnestly utters lines such as this: "I have heard that on the night before great battles soldiers often do not sleep, but under the eye of death take on a last wondrous animation." Her speech is absurdly poetic: "I looked away from our certain plight. Looked toward loveliness," she says. "For fanned around my feet . . . were tiny stones and curly shells which the clear water waved and winked at me like baubles. . . ." This kind of writing fails to provoke the involvement of readers; it only elicits impatience and frustration.
Homeward Bound
Far more compelling is Enemy Women, by Paulette Jiles (Morrow, $24.95), also a historical novel with a willful heroine, but one whose feistiness doesn't seem so grating. A poet and memoirist, Jiles writes in blunt, lovely prose: "The light of the world failed to gray and shoals of lightning bugs drifted down the valley in white, insubstantial fires, millions of icy bone-lights."
During the Civil War, 18-year-old Adair Colley lives with her widowed father and two sisters in the Missouri Ozarks. In November 1864, Union militia storm through the region, setting fire to Adair's house and kidnapping her father. Although her family has remained neutral in the war, Adair is accused of being a Confederate sympathizer, arrested by Union soldiers, and taken to a women's prison in St. Louis.
Like Charles Frazier's Civil War-Era novel Cold Mountain, Jiles's debut chronicles a long journey toward home, as Adair eventually tries to get back to her family, and a romance, between Adair and the sympathetic Union major who interrogates her. The two begin a cautious affair, and before he is transferred to Alabama, he helps Adair escape from prison and promises to find her again. As Adair begins a frightening, lonely trip back to southeastern Missouri, the major experiences his own harrowing journey in battle.
Comparing Enemy Women to Cold Mountain doesn't quite do Jiles's novel justice. In Adair Colley, she has created a character like someone right out of a Carson McCullers novel -- Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, to be exact. Both Adair and her model break your heart, but neither cares much about being liked. You can't help admiring their impertinence. •
Carmela Ciuraru is editor of the anthologies "First Loves" and the forthcoming "Beat Poets." She lives in New York City.
