Short stories
Mother's Beloved
ແຜ່ນດິນແມ່
Outhine Bounyavong · 1980
Synopsis
Short texts in which the country's ordinary people, peasants and humble folk, are caught in moments without emphasis. Nothing in them is demonstrated: a tiny gesture, an opened road, a felled tree are enough to judge modernity, and the text stops before the lesson. It is a deceptive gentleness, beneath which a severe gaze passes.
Context
The collection was published five years after the Pathet Lao took power, when publishing was entirely run by the State and literature was expected to serve socialism. Its author was an editor at the Ministry of Information all his life, and it was his wife who had his texts published abroad after his death. Laos had suffered between 1964 and 1973 the most intense aerial bombardment in history, relative to its population, and none of this is said in these pages.
Who it is for
Very short stories, in simple language. The American bilingual collection is the only accessible edition.
Prizes and reception
Fourteen of his short stories appeared in English in 1999, the first Lao collection in that language and the main gateway into this literature from outside the country.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.