The Beauty of Humanity Movement: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Gibb, Camilla

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 159420280X ISBN 13 : 9781594202803

Editeur : Penguin Press HC, The, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Gibb Camilla

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Reader reviews from BookBrowse:

"I enjoyed reading this book. The Vietnamese characters were skillfully brought to life by the author. A good job was done showing contemporary Vietnamese life while reviewing much of the history of this country. In America we don't know the story of the North Vietnamese people. This book brings out the problems and delights of their culture. By seeing North Vietnam through the eyes of a woman who is Vietnamese by birth but spent much of her life in America we can relate to many of her impressions. This book would be good for discussions in a book club."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Doris K. (Angora, MN)

"I found this a compelling, very well-written book that touches on many issues and ideas: Vietnam and Vietnamese history, culture and society; family; art and politics; how cultures and traditions shift in the face of history; "outsider" perspectives on America and Americans; food and cooking; and love and relationships. I've been to Hanoi, where the book takes place, once, for only a single week, but found her descriptions so accurate that I assumed her cultural and historical perceptions must be as well. Highly recommended."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Susan B. (Rutledge, MO)

"Camilla Gibb has created a love story, a history, and a biography which takes place in Viet Nam. This book contains so much of an education, yet it is delivered in a beautiful and interesting manor. I enjoyed this book and have been inspired to find out more of the history of Viet Nam both yesterday and today."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Trezeline B. (Columbia, MD)

"Having been a huge fan of Camilla Gibb's previous book, Sweetness In the Belly, I expected to immediately be swept up with her new one. I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't to happen right away in this book, but very much rewarded as she slowly wove her magic, unveiling an exquisite story of contemporary Vietnam, particularly her tying in of its art and literature. The main character, Old Man Hung, is a private, yet charming man who creates his own magic with his secret recipe for pho, an aromatic beef noodle soup that makes him sought after in the nearby towns. Among some of his frequent customers are a woman who is Vietnamese from the US in search of her artist father, and a young man named Tu, who is an enterprising tour guide that she enlists to show her around. These characters, as well as others in the story, are very likable, and the author does a wonderful job in her descriptions of the foods, smells, the poverty, as well as the beauty of the land and the art. A lovely and gripping novel."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Linda G. (Walnut Creek, CA)

"This was a very moving book. The story touches on the effects of war, political upheaval, repression and poverty, which might be difficult for some to read. It also touches on love and survival. It was both haunting and hopeful. I would highly recommend the book."
-Rated 5of 5 by Mary B. (St Paul, MN)

"I loved this book! Being a baby-boomer, I have long wondered why there have not been more books written about the Vietnam War and its after effects. The author writes with great sensitivity about some very difficult issues. I was impressed by her ability to weave together the stories of the various characters. Even the minor characters are memorable and add to the richness of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to readers who are interested in the people, rather than the politics or the battles, of the Vietnam War era of American history."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Kathleen W. (Appleton, WI)

"I found this an interesting read. The story is a nice blend of modern and old Vietnamese culture. There are few books in English which deal with this period of North Vietnam history. The characters are interesting and the story includes information about cooking and visual art two of my favorite subjects. I also appreciated that the author did not seem to have any political slants and just told a story."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Carolyn G. (South Pasadena, CA)

"As one who lived through the turmoil perpetuated by the Vietnam War, I've reacted to this lovely book on many levels. The first was in the reliving of the horror of body bags televised nightly combined with the civil unrest perpetuated by this very unpopular war. Now some 30-40 years later comes this well crafted story of this small group of Vietnamese people giving insight as to what this war was really about. The author is able to make you see the sights and smell the smells of Vietnam as well as make you care about the main characters, particularly Hung. The struggles of the main characters humanize the war in a way that is new to me. The book certainly lends itself for discussion in many directions.
Though the Beauty of Humanity Movement refers to a group of artists and poets struggling to express their art, to me the real Beauty of Humanity Movement is embodied in this small group of people who in spite of all their hardships never waiver in their devotion to one another.
I highly recommend this book."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Iris F. (W. Bloomfield, Michigan)

"At once both a brilliantly conceived novel about the past and present in Vietnam, and an inquiry into family, love and responsibility, Camilla Gibbs writes with familiarity with the country: in particular the trauma, deprivation and political turmoil the north experienced during the years of the American War. The main characters are well developed, especially Hung, the itinerant pho vendor. One thing that struck me was Hung's recognition of the difference in 3 generations, with the middle one-the ones who became silenced or compromised by the revolution-not the same as the dissidents of the first and the young influenced by the post war cultural changes since opening to the west. The arts endure and somehow a people survive, nourished by what's most meaningful to them. Love and redemption for Hung and Lan, Maggie, Tu and Binh transcend the boundaries of traditional family and bring together the stories of a nation in conflict. Few Americans have heard stories about how North Vietnam endured during our war there. Having spent time in communist or post-communist countries I'm familiar with the corrosive effects of the system on the population and Gibb has woven those into the story skillfully. This is a good book club read as well as for individuals interested in the country or the period."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Claire M. (Sarasota, Florida)

"I loved the prospective of this book. It gives back ground into a world I think is unfamiliar to most people. I found myself not wanting to put it down and/or picking up just to read a couple more lines here and there. It offers mystery, history and culture. I feel this book would appeal to a great many readers."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Maggie P. (Redmond, WA)

"I enjoyed this book. Ms Gibb is a good writer. (Actually, I have been browsing Amazon.com to select another of her books.) Her characters were very well developed. I was pleasantly surprised by how knowledgeable she was about the conflicts the Vietnamese people engaged against the French and the Americans to regain their country. I lived during those years and was aware of the later conflict since I was a member of the US Army Reserve. However, this book refreshed my memory that people were basically alike regardless of their language, color of their skin, and so forth. As I was reading her book, the statement, "War is Hell", kept surfacing and that common people (like you and I) came to mind for we truly suffer during war time."
I have been reading recently about other Asian countries who have revolted successfully against repressive governments which have become repressive themselves. Having absolute power is very irresistible and addictive.
I would recommend this book to book clubs since it raises many interesting discussion topics."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Jerry P. (Santa Rosa, CA)

"This is a wonderful book with a setting that is unique for historical fiction. Set shortly after the opening of Vietnam after the war, on the surface, it is the story of a Viet Nieu (refugee) woman returning to Vietnam to discover the fate of her father, left behind when she and her mother escaped at the end of the war. In reality, it is the story of the Vietnamese coming to grips with the new world of united Vietnam, returning refugees and the modern world. In my mind, the star of the book is Old Man Hung, a pho-seller who ties the other characters together. Maggie's search for her father never quite clicked for me, I never felt that I understood her feelings for her father, but the rest of the characters made up for that. Even the incidental characters are fully realized, and the setting was perfectly described--I felt I was there in the heat and humidity, the old city decaying and the new city rising, and over all of it were the characters who, lacking their original families, make new ones with what is left. This book made me want to run out and find some pho! The writing is beautiful, the characters stayed with me long after putting the book down and the atmosphere was wonderful. I was especially interested in the views of the war from the Vietnamese viewpoints, which I hadn't encountered before. I would have liked a glossary though, as there were many Vietnamese words included in the text and it would have been easier to look them up in a glossary than try to find them again so I could puzzle them out."
-Rated 5 of 5 by Patricia S. (Chicago, IL)

Extrait :

A Note of Grace
 
 
Old Man Hung makes the best phở in the city and has done so for decades. Where he once had a shop, though, he no longer does, because the rents are exorbitant, both the hard rents and the soft—the bribes a proprietor must pay to the police in this new era of freedom.
 
Still, Hung has a mission, if not a licence. He pushes the firewood, braziers and giant pots balanced on his wooden cart through the streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter in the middle of the night and sets up his stall in a sliver of alleyway, on an oily patch of factory ground, at the frayed edge of a park or in the hollow carcass of a building under construction. He’s a resourceful, roving man who, until very recently, could challenge those less than half his age to keep up.
 
When he is forced to move on, word will travel from the herb seller, or the noodle maker, or the man delivering newspapers, to the shopkeepers along Hàng Bông Road who make sure to pass the information on to his customers, particularly to Bình, the one who is like a son to him, out buying a newspaper or a couple of cigarettes in the earliest of morning hours, returning home to rouse his own son, Tu, slapping their bowls, spoons and chopsticks into his satchel, jerking the motorbike out of his kitchen and into the alleyway, and joining the riders of three million other motorbikes en route to breakfast, at least forty of them destined for Hung.
 
His customers, largely men known to him for a number of years, are loyal, some might say dependent. He is loyal and most certainly dependent. This is his livelihood, his being, his way in the world, and has been ever since he first came to apprentice in his Uncle Chien’s phở shop at eleven years of age.
 
It was 1933 when his father sent him from the rice fields to the city, getting Hung well out of the way of a mother who cherished him least of all her ten children. She’d kept him at a distance ever since a fortune teller had confirmed her suspicions that the large black mole stretching from the outer corner of Hung’s left eye to the middle of his cheekbone was an inauspicious sign. Tattooed with the promise of future darkness, the fortune teller had decreed.
 
Hung had come to his Uncle Chien with no name other than “nine,” denoting his place in the birth order, becoming Hung only in Hanoi, under the guardianship of his uncle, a man who neither subscribed to village superstitions nor could afford to turn help away.
 
This morning, Hung has set up shop in the empty kidney of a future swimming pool attached to a hotel under construction near the Ngũ Xá Temple. It has taken several attempts to get his fire started in the damp air, but as the dark grey of night yields to the lighter grey of clouded morning, the flames burn an orange as pure and vibrant as a monk’s robe.
 
Some of his customers have already begun to slip over the lip of the pool, running down its incline with their bowls, spoons and chopsticks, racing to be head of the queue.
 
Hung works like the expert he is, using his right hand to lay noodles into each bowl presented to him, covering these with slices of rare beef, their edges curling immediately with the heat of the broth he is simultaneously ladling into each bowl with his left.
 
“There you go, Nguyễn. There you go, Phúc, little Min,” and off his first customers shuffle with their bowls to squat on the concrete incline, using their spoons and chopsticks to greet the dawn of a new day.
 
Ah, and here is Bình, greeting him quietly as always, bowl in hands, never particularly animated until he’s had a few sips of broth. Although he is well into his fifties, Bình is a man still so like the boy who used to accompany his father, Ðạo, to Hung’s phở shop back in the revolutionary days of the early 1950s. The world has changed much since then, but Bình remains the same mindful, meditative soul who used to pad about after Hung, helping him carry the empty bowls out to the dishwasher in the alleyway behind the shop.
 
“There you go, Bình,” Hung says, as he does every morning, dropping a handful of chopped green herbs into his bowl from shoulder height with exacting flourish.
 
“Hung, what happened to your glasses?” Bình asks of the crack that bisects the left lens.
 
Hung, loath to admit he inadvertently sat upon them last night, shrugs as if it is a mystery to him too.
 
“Come”—Bình gestures—“let me fix them for you.”
 
Hung dutifully unhooks his glasses from his ears and hands them to Bình’s son, Tu, who is waiting beside his father with his empty bowl. Tu tucks them into his father’s shirt pocket, and Bình shuffles left, making way for his son.
 
Tu, just twenty-two years old but so full of confidence, greets Hung with more words than Bình ever does and waves his chopsticks left and right as he tries to calculate the size of the pool. This is very much like him—Tu loves numbers in a way that seems to pain him. He used to teach math at a high school, but he has abandoned that recently in favour of entertaining tourists. Hung is not sure all that foreign interaction is good for the boy, but he trusts Bình is monitoring the situation.
 
Hung indulges Tu with a challenge this morning: “I’d like to see you calculate the pool’s volume in terms of the number of bowls of phở that would be required to fill it.”
 
Tu grins as he manoeuvres his way carefully across the pool, holding his bowl right under his nose, the steam rising like incense smouldering in a temple to bathe his face.
 
Hung has taught Tu, Bình and Bình’s father, Ðạo, before him that you can tell a good broth by its aroma, the way it begs the body through the nose. And phở bắc—the phở of Hanoi—is the greatest seducer, because of the subtle dance of seasonings that animates the broth. It is not just the seasonings that make phở bắc distinct, it is provenance, a lesson Hung would happily deliver to anyone interested in listening.
 
The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that phở was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire, as Hung’s Uncle Chien explained to him long ago.
 
“We’re a clever people,” his uncle had said. “We took the best the occupiers had to offer and made it our own. Fish sauce is the key—in matters of soup and well beyond. Even romance, some people say.”
 
 
It was only with the painful partitioning of the country in 1954 that phở went south; the million who fled communism held the taste of home in their mouths, the recipe in their hearts, but their eyes grew big in the markets of Saigon and they began to adulterate the recipe with imported herbs and vegetables. The phởs of Saigon had flourished brash with freedom and abundance while the North ate a poor man’s broth, plain and watered down, with chicken in place of beef as the Party ordered the closure of independent businesses like Hung’s and a string of government-owned cafeterias opened in their place.
 
Terrible stuff it was, grey as stagnant rainwater in a gutter. Those who are old enough to remember it thank Hung for getting rid of the mouldy taste in their mouths. Kids of Tu’s generation probably can’t even imagine it. Tu was born just before the government’s desperately needed economic reforms of 1986, when the market was liberalized in order to alleviate starvation and independent ownership once again became a possibility. Only then could the true potential of phở be realized.
 
The challenge for Hung now has less to do with the availability of ingredients than with the need for restraint. Hung sees himself as a guardian of purity, eschewing bean sprouts and excessive green garnish in accordance with northern tradition. They may well have opened their doors to the world, but that does not mean they must pollute their bowls. Ăn bắc; mặc nam, they say—eating as in the North; clothing as in the South—something so fundamental must be respected through deference to tradition.
 
Hung is a man governed by such principles rather than any laws, particularly those ones keenly enforced by the police that are of greatest inconvenience to him and those he serves. When the officers come to ticket him for trespassing or operating without a licence after he has had the peace of setting up shop in the same location for a few consecutive days, his customers will be forced to run off clutching their bowls, sloshing broth against their freshly pressed shirts, losing noodles to the pavement, jumping aboard their motorbikes and lurching into the day.
 
Hung’s crime is the same every day, but sometimes the police are in more of a mood to arrest a man than fine him. “Where did you relieve yourself this morning?” an officer in such a mood had asked him a few months ago.
 
Hung had shaken his head. The question made no sense. “Where did you pee, old man?” The officer raised his voice, threatening to arrest Hung for resisting a police officer if he didn’t answer the question.
 
Hung reluctantly pointed toward a patch of grass and asked, “Has peeing now been declared a crime?”
 
No...

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Press HC, The
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 159420280X
• ISBN 13: 9781594202803
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320