This is the first book I have read about the Vietnam war, a subject that is painful to talk about. This book certainly added to the intensity and poignancy of it. The novel starts and ends in April, 1975, the fall of Saigon, with a flashback in between. In the heart of the story is Helen, a photojournalist, who epitomizes the ambivalence attached to this war. She, too, is torn in so many ways: between the Saigon she has come to love and America, her homeland, between the married lover Darrow and the soft-spoken mysterious Linh, between her sympathy to the innocents, both Vietnamese and American, and all against the equally conflicting imagery, savagely torn but beautiful, green and lush Vietnam.
'The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber's razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade's metal grabbing the sun,'(opening lines)
'She looked at the various poses of the Buddha in his enlightenment. Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.'(41-42)
'Superstition held that if one traveled too far from one's birthplace, one's soul would fly out and return home, leaving one nothing more than a ghost, but if that were true the whole world would be filled with nothing more than wanderers, empty shades.'(42-43)
'For the first time since Linh had left his village, he felt something move within him, the anesthesia of grief briefly lifted. What he felt was fear for Darrow. To survive this war, one should not be brave.'(67-68)
'Why is it, you suppose, that the people who are supposed to love us the most are precisely the ones who try to stop us doing what we love? "(89)
"Sometimes you have to fulfill a promise in order to deserve the love you're given. Don't you think it's a calling to live in danger just to capture the face of those who are suffering? To show their invisible lives to the world?"(89)
'She did not think it was true that women fell in love all at once, but rather that they fell in love through repetition, just the way someone became brave.'(100)
'... the mystery came in its own language to each person, and you had to decipher it on your own.'(138-139)
'Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo's heavy footfalls... Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.'(172)
"We're making bigger and bigger mistakes because we can't admit we made the first one. We can't lose a war to a small Asian country."
The monk giggled and covered his mouth. "But you'll have to fight till every last Vietnam man is gone."(193)
'Still as clear as after they lifted off from that beach -- the photograph wasn't enough. Helped no one. Soldiers still died, civilians suffered, nothing alleviated in the smallest amount by the fact that a shutter had opened and shut, that light had stuck grains on emulsion, that patterns of light and dark would preserve their misery. No defense at all against the evil that had been perpetuated. Out on the beach that day, it had all been failure. Even the best picture would be forgotten, the page flipped.'(241)
""Sometimes one's past makes it harder to understand the present. I love Americans, but I don't know if they are good for the Vietnam people. I want them to stay and to leave at the same time." Linh took a deep breath, then shook his head. How could he make her see? His relationship with her, with all the American, genuine and false.'(309)
'This is what happened when one left one's home -- pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone... The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.'(377)
'It is like a medic performing triage. You determine who will die anyway, and you move to those who you can save. You want to stand over the dead and cry, but that helps no one. That's a tourist's sensibility. Day after day I go out with photographer's who are tourists of the war."(328)
St. Martin's Press First Edition
386 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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