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Very shortly after hearing about Ann Morgan's A Year of Reading the World site, I left for a short holiday in Viet Nam and Cambodia. — What a perfect opportunity to kick-start my own Read the World project by reading some local authors in the country they are from!
Off I headed to my local bookstore with a list of Vietnamese authors in hand. To my dismay, none of them were stocked on the shelves. Trips to other bookshops also came up fruitless and I realised that things might not go quite according to plan. Most all of the authors were in fact banned by the communist government in Vietnam for being too subversive or counterrevolutionary.
I boarded my plane to Saigon empty-handed, hoping that a local bookstore would have some State-sanctioned fiction that I could pick up. The helpful staff at Artbook at 43 Đồng Khởi Street confirmed that the authors on my list were still banned in the country, save Vũ Trọng Phụng, who had been recently "rehabilitated".
Phụng is considered one of the most influential figures in modern Vietnamese literature. His book, Dumb Luck, was published in 1936, but was then subsequently banned in most of the country for its critical portrayal of colonial society and for its "bourgeois tendencies". Dumb Luck is a vivid and often unexpectedly absurd tale of a street-smart ruffian who rises within colonial society and its preoccupation with sex, fashion, and capitalism. The book is very much a satire, a scathing commentary of the rapidly changing Hanoi of the period that made me laugh out loud on a number of occasions. A great first stop on my journey to read the world!
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