2006 Books: Over The Moat
This (.com) (.co.uk
) is the true story of an American who, on a bike tour through Vietnam, is suddenly smitten by a girl at a kiosk in Hue. On the way back from Hanoi to Saigon by train, he impulsively gets off and goes back to her house to ask her to be his. She says that she can't answer yet, she can't answer till she's known him for a year. Can he wait a year? Can he wait a year in Hue?
It's a great setup for a book, but I was hoping to enjoy it more than I did. The problem is that the author is a bit incurious. The love story unfolds slowly, and during the time it unfolds -- a whole year -- it's not clear what he does. He writes in notebooks, but it all seems to be observations of himself. He can't get a job because of local regulations, except for some occasional work teaching English, so he isn't thrown into situations where he encounters Vietnamese other than Thuy and her family on a daily basis; and he doesn't try to integrate with other Vietnamese groups, perhaps to avoid causing trouble for them; so it means that the only Vietnamese he encounters are friendly barmen and hotelkeepers, and opponents in the police force and the immigration services. There are some nice descriptive passages and some of the turning points in the love story are genuinely tender and touching, but there are also some startlingly infelicitous sentences for a writing workshop graduate: "You couldn't forge mettle with the notes of an inspirational soundtrack running through your head" or "On day seventeen, my appetite quietly called for more than the couple of spoonfuls that had been satisfying it".
Pleasant, but I was hoping for more.
) is the true story of an American who, on a bike tour through Vietnam, is suddenly smitten by a girl at a kiosk in Hue. On the way back from Hanoi to Saigon by train, he impulsively gets off and goes back to her house to ask her to be his. She says that she can't answer yet, she can't answer till she's known him for a year. Can he wait a year? Can he wait a year in Hue?
It's a great setup for a book, but I was hoping to enjoy it more than I did. The problem is that the author is a bit incurious. The love story unfolds slowly, and during the time it unfolds -- a whole year -- it's not clear what he does. He writes in notebooks, but it all seems to be observations of himself. He can't get a job because of local regulations, except for some occasional work teaching English, so he isn't thrown into situations where he encounters Vietnamese other than Thuy and her family on a daily basis; and he doesn't try to integrate with other Vietnamese groups, perhaps to avoid causing trouble for them; so it means that the only Vietnamese he encounters are friendly barmen and hotelkeepers, and opponents in the police force and the immigration services. There are some nice descriptive passages and some of the turning points in the love story are genuinely tender and touching, but there are also some startlingly infelicitous sentences for a writing workshop graduate: "You couldn't forge mettle with the notes of an inspirational soundtrack running through your head" or "On day seventeen, my appetite quietly called for more than the couple of spoonfuls that had been satisfying it".
Pleasant, but I was hoping for more.