UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "A Time Far Past" by L. Luu

Le Luu

Translated from the Vietnamese by Ngo Vinh Hai, Nguyen Ba Chung, Kevin Bowen, and David Hunt

An award-winning novel from Viet Nam, portraying three decades of upheaval from 1955 through 1985

This epic novel presents a sweeping portrait of war and peace in northern Viet Nam from the defeat of the French to the mid-1980s. The story follows the odyssey of Giang Minh Sai, the son of a Confucian scholar in the rural Red River delta, from his early childhood through his decorated service during the American War and his later efforts to adapt to the postwar world of urban Ha Noi. Through two failed marriages, Giang Minh Sai struggles to come to terms with his responsibilities, his past, and his future. The novel's ending leaves its hero and Vietnamese socialism at a problematic and painful crossroads.

In its intricate sketching of complicated alliances, personal debts, and human interactions, A Time Far Past explores the complex layering of family and village history and Party and feudal authority. It also paints a vivid picture of the vast dislocations in Vietnamese culture caused by the political and military turmoil of the Indochina wars.

A Time Far Past was enormously popular in Viet Nam, where it was first published in 1986, selling more than 120,000 copies and winning that country's national prize for fiction

"This is one of the most significant novels written in Viet Nam since the end of the war. Le Luu is popular and well-respected, and is regarded as something like the 'Hemingway of Viet Nam.'"

Larry Heinemann, author of Close Quarters and Paco's Story
"This is a lucid and readable translation. It will appeal to a variety of audiences, including historians, literary critics, students, and the general public."

Qui-Phiet Tran, Schreiner College

Born in Hai Hung Province, Le Luu was an army courier on the Ho Chi Minh trail and a combat correspondent during the American War. He is an editor for the literary magazine Van Nghe Quan Doi.

Writer-translator Ngo Vinh Hai and poet-literary scholar Nguyen BA Chung are both natives of Viet Nam and now live near Boston.

Kevin Bowen is adjunct professor of English and director of the William Joiner Center and David Hunt is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Fiction / Viet Nam Studies
296 pp.
LC 96-47787
$30.00t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-085-X
1997

Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in cooperation with the Translation Project of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences.

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