Paradise of the Blind
by Dương Thu Hương
A Vietnamese woman carries her family's revolutionary wounds to Moscow.
For you if
you want to understand Vietnam's communist experiment through the families it destroyed in the name of building something better
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Hang is a Vietnamese factory worker in Russia summoned to Moscow by her uncle — a Communist Party official — whose land reform ideology destroyed her family a generation earlier. Hương moves between present-day Moscow and the Vietnam of the 1950s land reform campaigns, the 1970s post-reunification hardship, the specific Vietnamese experience of a revolution that consumed its own people. Published in Vietnam in 1988, banned immediately, smuggled to France. The first Vietnamese novel to be translated into English. A dispatch about what happens when ideology decides it knows better than families.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Vietnam • Southeast Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Vietnamese author
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