DUONG Thu Huong
Vietnam
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- Thu Huong DUONG
Dương Thu Hương was born in Vietnam in 1947. A member of a revolutionary family and a member of the communist party, she is part of the Hồ Chí Minh generation. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade that provided entertainment – her mission was to “sing louder than the bombs” - for the Northern Vietnamese soldiers at the front on the 17th parallel, the most heavily bombarded area of Vietnam. Back in Hanoi in 1977, she started writing for Vietnamese television. In 1980, when one of her plays was censured, she began speaking out loudly against censorship and intellectual cowardice. Starting in 1989 with the policy of ’renewal’, Duong Thu Huong gained greatly in popularity with the people and started losing favour with the party.
Ever the defender of human rights and democratic reform, values that she promoted in her writings, Duong Thu Huong was expelled from the communist party in 1990 for her ’lack of discipline’, before being imprisoned without a trial on April 14, 1991. Her arrest launched a protest movement by human rights defence leagues in France and the USA. She was freed in November 1991. She lives under house arrest in Hanoi. Though she is one of Vietnam’s most popular writers, most of her fiction is published outside of Vietnam due to both the censorship and the government’s monopoly of the publishing industry. Her books are translated all over the world.
Duong Thu Huong travelled to France in 2006 to promote her No Man’s Land. She decided to stay there and keep on writing. She has since published Itinéraire d’enfance, in 2007, followed by Au Zénith in 2009 both at Éditions Sabine Wespieser.
Bibliography :
Au Zénith (in French, Éditions Sabine Wespieser, 2009)
Itinéraire d’enfance (In French, Éditions Sabine Wespieser, 2007)
No Man’s Land (Hyperion East, 2005) - Terre des oublis
Memories of a Pure Spring (Hyperion Books, 2000)
Beyond Illusions (Picador, 1999) - Au-delà des illusions
Novel Without a Name (William Morrow & Co, 1995) - Roman sans titre
Paradise of the Blind (William Morrow & Co, 1993) - Paradis aveugles
Synopsis of Au Zénith :
Au Zénith is Duong Thu Huong’s literary masterpiece, a book she waited more than ten years to write and that combines her political stance and her literary talent. It tells of a president – he is never named but the reader quickly understands that it is Ho Chi Minh - who falls madly in love at over sixty years of age with a very young woman. He starts a family with her and installs them in Hanoi soon after the city has been won back. The president is not an ordinary man, he is the father of the nation. When he expresses the desire to make his union official, the ministers, whom he has helped achieve their lofty position convince him that this private affair may very well cause his political downfall. The president gives in the belief he has opted for legitimate reasons of state.
From that point on, everything in his life starts collapsing. His young companion is murdered, his children are taken in by friends and relatives and the real power escapes him. His former companions, hiding behind his tutelary position are developing a regime based on an ideology that is totally different from what they struggled towards in their shared youth. In order to better depict this private and political drama, the author uses all her talents to develop an amazing story from four different points of view : that if the president who, at the end of his life, during the war against the Americans, whose only companions are the soldiers watching him and the Buddhist nuns of the neighbouring pagoda, tries to make sense of his own life ; that of his best friend, Vu, who is bringing up his son and whose wife, a former uncompromising revolutionary like him is the symbol of corrupted power ; and as a counterpoint and bucolic viewpoint in the story, Duong Thu Huong recounts how an old and respected man in a woodcutters’ village has succeeded in gaining the acceptance – not without great difficulty - of the villagers for his union with a woman forty years younger than he is ; and lastly, the point of view of the brother-in-law of the young murdered wife who, driven mad by pain has survived only to avenge her death.
All through this very impressive saga, the writer – defender of the ideas promoted by the president until the end – depicts the fate, all the more tragic in that the protagonist really existed, of a real man, a man of power.
Synopsis of Itinéraire d’enfance :
In this book, the writer deals with the tribulations of a brave and mischievous little girl in Vietnam at the end of the 50’s. Bê, age twelve, lives happily with her mother, a teacher in the village of Rêu, in the centre of the country. Her father is a soldier, posted on the northern border. They lead a quiet life between forays to the river and outings to the touring circus where Bê leads her comrades, and school where she shows her resoluteness, rebelling against compromise and helping her weaker comrades. It is while seeking to avenge one of her classmates, who is the victim of the gym teacher’s constant attentions (she locks the seducer up in the bathroom) that she ends up being expelled from the school, even though she is actually one of the best pupils. Bê tries to rebel against such injustice, but it is all in vain, nothing will help, not even her hunger strike. So she decides to set out to look for her father. Her best friend, Loan, unhappy about her mother’s second marriage to the head of the village, a greedy and violent man, decides to go along with her on a trip that will turn out to be a rather incredible journey.
Duong Thu Huong takes the reader on a veritable initiatory journey. The reader will watch the young protagonist grow as they meet various people on their journey which will take them through beautiful landscapes. Bê will eventually understand the true meaning of freedom without ever forgetting the values her parents have taught her. It is a clear and luminous novel, often funny, written like a story which reveals a lot about the protagonist’s personality as well as that of the writer who confesses that young Bê takes a lot after her…
Dimanche - 11h15 : Le roman de l’Histoire
avec : DUONG Thu Huong, Mathias ENARD, Jean-Marie BLAS DE ROBLES |
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