To Tell the Truth

BEYOND ILLUSIONS, A Novel, By Duong Thu Huong, Translated from the Vietnamese by Nina McPherson

The Vietnamese government’s ban on the writings of Duong Thu Huong has turned a local dissident into an international figure. Political authorities confiscated her first novel, “Beyond Illusions,” when it was published in 1987, but Vietnamese readers snapped up thousands of copies before they disappeared.

The following year authorities condemned Huong’s second novel, “Paradise of the Blind,” and her advocacy of political reforms soon got her expelled from the Communist Party and jailed for months without trial. But in 1993 a translation of “Paradise” reached audiences around the world, and the author’s growing fame led publishers abroad to print two more of her books banned at home.

Now Huong’s debut novel has finally been translated into English: the story of how Linh, an idealistic young schoolteacher in postwar Hanoi, moves “beyond illusions” about politics and love.

Linh has married Nguyen, an older man who dazzles her with idealistic eloquence about the battles his generation fought against America, China, legacies of colonialism and the feudal past. But when government officials betray the cause that put them in power, Nguyen balks at using his position as a journalist to expose them.

To safeguard his newspaper job, he covers up the swindles of party leaders and the failure of their policies to solve the shortages of food, work and housing that pit ordinary citizens against one another in daily struggles to survive. He even praises the monumentally stupid agricultural development projects that are destroying the nation’s food supply.

Disillusioned, Linh leaves Nguyen for a gifted musician with a seemingly noble soul, but he turns out to be a smooth-talking party climber who has seduced dozens of women.

Loathing the Lothario is a pleasure. So is weighing the ideas of minor philosophers who pop up--Professor Le, lawyer Trung, a nameless painter. Still, though the historical background compels interest, the plot can feel melodramatic and incoherent.

An author who so distrusts sentimentality should avoid “human dreams mingled with ... suffering” and “music ... from the secret storms of the heart,” and one wishes her characters wouldn’t “scream” so often inside themselves or at one another. The omniscient point of view sometimes lurches, as when Nguyen gazes into his wife’s eyes while admiring the beauty mark on the back of her neck.

But “Beyond Illusions” was Huong’s first book. In “Paradise of the Blind” and “Novel Without a Name”--Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson also translated these--the first-person narrators make subtle, evolving syntheses of life’s jolts and noise, so that the characters in the stories develop instead of just changing their minds. Readers of “Beyond Illusions” who know Huong’s other work will recognize the authenticity and integrity of her vision.

They’ll also get to trace the impressive artistic growth of a writer who should be honored, in any case, for daring to tell the truth when only silence is safe.

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Judy Lightfoot is the author of a book of poetry, “Calling the Crow.”