The Crystal Messenger

"Yes, I included it anyway because I do think it’s a graceful novel. It’s beautifully written as a stream of consciousness. It’s not about the war and there are very few novels in translation of that period that aren’t. The novel portrays a traumatized post-war Hanoi. At the end of the war in 1975, after the reunification of North and South Vietnam, the economy had totally collapsed. They had nothing. Again, it’s bleak. It’s the story of a young woman coming of age. Her family are communist cadres and she’s a free spirit, an outsider who doesn’t accept the social mores of the time, the strictness of socialism. She describes Hanoi as a city full of faceless humans, fear and denunciations. She’s courted by a menacing man she calls Quang the dwarf whom she rejects when he proposes marriage. Quang then rises in the communist hierarchy and takes revenge by arresting her brother and imprisoning him for financial dealings. Another brother loses his opportunity to do his PhD because he’s found consorting with a woman who is supposedly a spy. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The redemption in the story is that the young protagonist retains her moral compass and humanity. Growing up in this bleak time, she separates humans into two categories: Homosapiens-A, or humans who know how to love, and Homosapiens-Z, humans who don’t know how to love. It’s just a beautiful, simple category that helps this young girl deal with her world. The Crystal Messenger is her baby sister. Born with a smile, her first word is: ‘kiss’. So you have these images of light and joy in an otherwise pretty dark picture. It’s a beautiful novel, but again, it was banned. I guess she wasn’t allowed to say that Vietnam was poor at that time. The novel was considered too pessimistic. The author lives in Berlin. They were saying that in the 90s, I think. Less so today because of the country’s prosperity and the renaissance in the arts. But certainly, the 80s and part of the 90s were very difficult times. It did, after 1986 when the government introduced a socialist-oriented market economy. The economic reforms were known as Đổi Mới or Renovation. That was the kickoff. Cultural censorship was relaxed. That’s when these novels were written. The arts began to flourish. It was much, much better, although Vietnam’s economy took longer to take off than China’s did. Yes, she’s talking about the period between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and 1984, so before Đổi Mới. But she’s able to write this in 1988, so afterwards. Although it was still banned. Yes. Although that’s where poetry comes in, which I didn’t include, but I’d like to mention. Poetry goes back centuries in Vietnam. It was a medium throughout the ages to express yourself relatively freely. One of Vietnam’s main literary achievements is the epic poem The Tale or Song of Kiều . A new translation was published in 2019 by Penguin Classics. If we’re talking about Vietnamese literature, it’s well worth reading. It was written in 1820 by the celebrated poet Nguyễn Du. And then the war poetry written by North Vietnamese poets sent to the battlefronts like Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ in Green Rice is very moving. It’s lyrical, and encompasses the range of human emotions from terrible sorrow to joy. Again, more freedom to express yourself in that format than in a novel, for example, or certainly in nonfiction."