Duong
Thu Huong
If
my review of this novel were limited to a single word, I would have to choose
"ambitious." Huong's novel tells the story of the final years of the
Vietnam dictatorship under Ho Chi Minh from multiple perspectives. As a
Euro-Canadian who was born after the novel's chronological setting, I felt like
I was missing out on a lot of the atmosphere that Huong goes to such great
lengths to depict in her novel. However, when something is clearly as written
from the heart as The Zenith is, one
can still appreciate it, in spite of some of Huong’s more subtle nuances going
over my head.
For
those who are well-read, The Zenith
feels like a cross between Joy Kogawa's Obasan
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred
Years of Solitude: it seamlessly blends beautiful storytelling with a
burning hope for social and political change. For those unfamiliar with those
works, The Zenith is a tremendously
rich novel, sprawling decades and taking readers to the lowest depths of human
depravity and back again. It's certainly not a light read at five hundred-plus pages
of politically and emotionally fuelled writing, but it's definitely worth the
adventure to read this novel.
-
Dallas Dunstan
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