A Time Far Past Book

David Hunt's introduction to "A Time Far Past" calls the novel "a signal event for Americans hoping to make sense of the Vietnam War." Yet the war itself takes up very little space in this relatively long book. Certainly, the protagonist Sai is a hero of the North and his courage and determination are demonstrated in one section of the book. He even heads south to fight but his activities there are curiously left out of the narrative. The focus is instead on the trajectory of his life as the nation travels from rural tradition to a Marxist state in which power is wielded from urban centers (even as the bulk of the population remains in the countryside). There is little direct criticism of the regime; the soldiers of the South are routinely called puppets, the Americans are the enemy, and the issues of promotion, joining the party, even personal relationships are all evaluated in terms of building the nation in language shot through with Marxist sloganeering and pressure to conform. But the novel makes clear on occasion that the new regime is not immune to strategic flattery or even the occasional artful bribe. More important, Sai and Huong, the central lovers, are initially separated because his mandarin family married him off (at ten!). But this is no classical Greek novel in which the lovers are reunited despite adversity. The Marxist orthodoxy of the army conspires to keep Sai from leaving his loveless marriage (here it must be admitted that the result is basically his abandonment of family). But once he does, Huong having married herself, he finds no relief in a second wife of the new urban Vietnam. In a way, Le-Luu seems, without being overtly critical of the state, to be saying that the new ideology, for all its idealism, is not much better at tending to the emotional needs of its people than the one it replaced.