Trong sương hồng hiện ra

Considered the most important writer of Vietnam's postwar generation, Ho Anh Thai brings an intimate knowledge of the Vietnam War into perspective with a style that is at once whimsical and sharp-sighted. In this first collection to be published in English, we meet characters such as the man who carries his mother's bones in his knapsack in "The Indian." Wherever he goes, the disapproving spirit of his mother seems to watch his actions, and when he extracts the bones from a pond that a lover has thrown them into, his guilt is multiplied upon finding that his mother's finger bones can't be found. In the story "Behind the Red Mist," a young man is magically transported into his own past during the war bombings. He meets his parents before they married and discovers that their generation is actually different from the way in which it had been portrayed to him as a child. Ananda, from "The Man Who Stood on One Leg," swears to pose on one leg, like the god Shiva dancing, until the factory director gives him 1 million rupees to build a temple. The director refuses, but when Ananda dies, the metaphoric temple that was Ananda becomes an emptiness in the town that the director feels compelled to fill. --Susan Swartwout