A Canadian soldier's return to Vietnam 30 years after the war sends powerful ripple effects throughout several lives, in Winnipeg author Bergen's moving fifth novel. A brief prologue locates Charles Boatman's adult daughter Ada and her younger brother Jon in Danang, seeking Charles, who has disappeared. Bergen then juxtaposes multiple stories. We learn of Charles's youth in Washington state, years of marriage and fatherhood in British Columbia and separate traumatic experiences in combat halfway around the world, and back home, where he's confronted by his wife Sara's infidelity, and her early death. Then, as he seeks the past in postwar Vietnam ("thinking . . . he might conclude an event in his life that had consumed and shaped him"), Charles finds only piercing echoes of the violence he had both suffered and perpetrated, with sadly foreseeable results. A parallel narrative follows Ada's travels and discoveries (with and without Jon) as she follows her father's gradually fading trail, dodges the attentions of a 14-year-old hustler-entrepeneur (Yen) who appoints himself her guide and guardian, and falls into a subdued sexual relationship with a middle-aged artist (Hoang Vu) who seems as perplexed by her obsession with him as does Ada herself ("Perhaps he was the country, or her father, or simply a notion of the country, or a notion of her father"). Bergen presents "the sorrow of war" as an exfoliating fog that grips and obscures all the war's victims-on the battlefield, in shared memories and in dreams filled with disturbing indigenous images. And, in excerpts from a combat novel written by a former North Vietnamese soldier-in which Charles (who reads it) finds his own sins and sorrowsmirrored-the unity of human suffering is made stunningly, heartbreakingly clear. A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.
Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam after the war.
Ada and her brother Jon follow their missing father to Vietnam. Their search for him tears them apart in ways they never could have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between Charles' and Ada's points of view, their journeys become increasingly colorful and complex as the story moves from the rural Pacific Northwest to the frenetic confusion of modern-day Vietnam. The suspense builds, dreamlike, to a paradoxical climax of revelation and obfuscation, love and grief.
This is a hauntingly beautiful story of family ties and human longing by the prize-winning, critically acclaimed Canadian author David Bergen.
Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam after the war.
Ada and her brother Jon follow their missing father to Vietnam. Their search for him tears them apart in ways they never could have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between Charles' and Ada's points of view, their journeys become increasingly colorful and complex as the story moves from the rural Pacific Northwest to the frenetic confusion of modern-day Vietnam. The suspense builds, dreamlike, to a paradoxical climax of revelation and obfuscation, love and grief.
This is a hauntingly beautiful story of family ties and human longing by the prize-winning, critically acclaimed Canadian author David Bergen.
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940169573145 |
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Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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