The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories

Book excerpt: This seventh volume in the Voices from Vietnam Series introduces U. S. readers to another major figure in modern Vietnamese letters. Doan Le is noted for her versatility of style and her originality. As Wayne Karlin notes in his introduction, "she is a master of allegory and gently complex satire; in her stories, a frustrated petitioner, unable to obtain housing can change not only into a fly, but into a gay fly (or a fly pretending to be gay); the dead can mirror the snobberies and passions of the living; a man can try to reason out the complexities of his relationship with his father's clone. As those situations might tell us, her stories can often be fantastical-Sholom Aleichem's village of Helm channeled by Kafka through Our Town-or they can be deeply personal and realistic. In both cases they grow unabashedly from the real vicissitudes of her life." Here, then, is the first presentation in English of a master of the short story in Vietnam. For the scholar, these stories will give insight into Vietnamese culture after the "renovation." For the general reader, these are intensely human and universal stories that deal with such subjects as greed, marriage, divorce, aging, human rights-stories that explore all the subtle enigmas of the human heart.