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In The Deep Green Sea, Robert Olen Butler has created a memorable and incandescent love story between Tien, a contemporary Vietnamese woman orphaned in 1975, when the city finally fell to the Communists, and Ben, a Vietnam veteran who returns from America to a war-torn land, seeking closure and a measure of peace. Bit by bit they learn more of each other's pasts. Secrets are revealed: Ben's love affair with a Vietnamese prostitute in 1966; Tien's mixed racial heritage and her abandonment byher bar-girl mother, who feared retribution from the North Vietnamese for having given birth to one of the hated "children of dust." In Butler's hands, what follows conjures the stuff of classical tragedy and also achieves a classic reconciliation of once-warring cultures. Infused equally with eroticism and with Butler's deep and abiding reverence for Vietnamese myth and history, The Deep Green Sea is a landmark work in the literature of love and war.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
In many ways, the Vietnam War defined Butler's writing. His most vivid work, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has been set there. In this sensual, tremulous and darkly portentous novel, war veteran Ben Cole returns to Saigon to try to understand the source of his postwar emotional lethargy. When he meets Tien, the enchanting 26-year-old employee of a tourist company, both immediately (perhaps too quickly to be credible) feel a compelling sexual attraction. The narrative is composed of their alternating voices, each describing their lovemaking in slow motion and with erotic explicitness. These sexual idylls are interspersed with flashbacks to Ben's war experiences and Tien's anguished memories of her mother's desertion when the conflict ended in 1975. As a bar girl and prostitute who had serviced American soldiers, Tien's mother feared retribution; just before she disappeared, she revealed that Tien's father was an American. When Ben realizes that Tien might be a daughter he never knew existed, they decide to try to find Tien's mother in her native village. During their trip on Highway One, the narrative achieves resonance as both the past and present coalesce for Ben. The ending, laboriously foreshadowed, assumes the mantle of classical tragedy. Butler's keenly observed picture of a politically and economically transformed country, and his sensitive descriptions of Vietnamese culture and spiritual beliefs, provide a fine balance to the more overwrought sections of the narrative. The novel suffers from a surfeit of run-on prose in which both protagonists express their thoughts in virtually indistinguishable voices. Though Butler excels in expressing the sensual delights of an intense passion, this tale of star-crossed lovers would have profited from less focus on the bed and more on the continuing reverberations of the tragic legacy of a brutal war. 75,000 first printing; author tour. (Jan.) FYI: Stories from Butler's Tabloid Dreams are the basis of an HBO special to be aired next spring. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
The allure of distant lands with unknown waters and foreign people compels writers to plunge into the search for the big Why of life. Pulitzer Prize^-winner Butler has come upon his heart of darkness in an erotic story about an American veteran of the war in Vietnam, who returns to that war zone in search of something more compelling and less prosaic than peace of mind, and a young Vietnamese woman, who is trying to reconcile traditional practices with contemporary life. At the core of their being is that conflagration that brought East and West once again within the same sphere. (But, Madama Butterfly this is not.) The narrative point of view alternates between the lovers. The man is Benjamin Cole. Ben's story is about life spent trying to meet the disparate expectations of his parents and then squandering his years in search of the "Ben" he caught sight of during the brief but searingly intense time that he was a soldier in Vietnam. She is Le Thi Tien. Tien's story is about life spent trying to be a new Communist Vietnamese woman living alone, except for fairy tales about dragons and prayers she offers to her dead father. Together their narratives run smoothly; but always the voices are distinct. Their words are simple, but the meanings are manifold and slippery. Butler works the pace with consummate skill: it is slow, but then it lulls the reader into the lovers' world to rush with them recklessly in search of answers. Undeniably, the story is predictable: from the moment that Tien talks of "suffering that comes from desire," one is sure that tragedy awaits. Still, one must stay with Butler, must chase after that big Why. Very special. --Bonnie Smothers
Kirkus评论
An ambitious, lyrical exploration of the lingering wounds of the Vietnamese war, familiar terrain for Pulitzer Prize--winning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993, etc.). Ben, a rootless American veteran, has gone back to Vietnam in what seems to be an attempt to recapture the strong, strange sense of being alive that his combat experiences gave him. It's a feeling that nothing in his life since then has matched. The country he goes back to is still suitably different, the aroma of diesel fumes and sweet spices in Ho Chi Minh City are the same, but the place also seems now deeply self-involved, withdrawn, wary. Except, that is, for Tien, a striking young woman who works for the Vietnamese Tourist Authority and finds herself powerfully, disturbingly drawn to Ben. Their swift courtship and rather urgent affair are rendered in a prose of great, simple power. Of course, given the history of their nations, their love is necessarily dangerous--and fragile. It is made more so by their personal histories: Ben has never quite gotten over his love for a Saigon bar girl he met during his tour of duty. And Tien, who was raised by her grandmother after her mother, a prostitute, abandoned her, still longs to confront her mother and find out who her father was. Tien and Ben find themselves being swept up into an increasingly frantic search for Tien's mother, a quest that sets in motion a series of tragic events. But it's obvious to readers long before it's clear to Ben and Tien just what they're going to find, and the tragedy Butler is building up to feels simply too unlikely for it to be as moving as he means it to be. Butler's prose is precise, sensuous, and moving. While the novel falls short of its goal, it is nonetheless an honest and intermittently powerful attempt to find some redemptive possibilities in the lingering nightmare of that war. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Pulitzer Prize winner Butler crafts a different kind of love story: a Vietnam veteran returns to the former city of Saigon and meets Tien, abandoned when the city fell by a bar-girl mother who feared recrimination because of her child's mixed racial heritage. Word has it that this is a sizzler. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.