Short stories
Vang bóng một thời
Not translated into English
Nguyễn Tuân · 1940
Synopsis
Twelve texts on gestures that colonisation was in the process of erasing. A scholar prepares tea at dawn in the fog, with water he has had fetched; people play at guessing verses, staking money; an executioner tends his sword stroke as an art and insists that it be clean; a man condemned to death calligraphs for his jailer, at night, in the cell. The men in them belong to a world that is ending and know it.
Context
Twelve texts, somewhere between the short narrative and the reflective stroll, written for a magazine column in 1939 and collected the following year by a Hanoi publisher. French censorship removed passages from it, from a single line to a few paragraphs; restoring them meant comparing the book with the magazine's instalments. Its author was twenty-nine and drew from his family background an intimate knowledge of these customs, which explains the precision of the descriptions.
Who it is for
About two hundred pages, in Vietnamese. Each text can be read on its own, and it is better not to read them one after another: the language is dense and the pleasure lies in the detail.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author the master of the genre, and whose title has become a common expression in Vietnamese.