可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Branch | Book | JUST | 1 | Stacks | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... Central | Book | JUST | 1 | Stacks | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
In this, his twelfth novel, Ward Just penetrates more deeply into America's role in the world than he has ever done before. This beautifully constructed large-canvas novel of Saigon in 1965 can be justly compared to Joseph Conrad's NOSTROMO or Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN. A DANGEROUS FRIEND is a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal. Here is the story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight. The exotic tropical surroundings, the coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, the visionary delusions of the American democratizers, all play their part. In A DANGEROUS FRIEND, a few civilians with bright minds and sunny intentions want to reform Vietnam -- but the Vietnam they see isn't the Vietnam that is. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign-aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood -- and in Saigon, the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. Before long, the rampant missteps and misplaced ideals trap Parade and others in a moral crossfire.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
With the appearance of his 12th novel, former journalist (and Vietnam reporter) Just (Echo House) has reason to be proud of the books he has produced, all of them thoughtful, judicious commentaries on the ironies inherent in politics, culture and human relationships. This trenchant work, set in 1965 Vietnam as the U.S. is inching toward full-scale war, may prove to be his most significant; certainly, it reflects with quiet understatement one of the central moral issues of our century. Its protagonist, Sydney Parade, is emblematic of the idealistic, dangerously nave Americans who felt it their mission to bring democracy to Southeast Asia. Recruited by Dicky RostokÄthe brash, arrogant head of the Llewellyn Group, a foundation that purports to administer financial aid and technical assistance to Vietnam but is in reality a covert arm of Pentagon policyÄSydney leaves his wife and daughter in Darien, Conn., and travels to a country town near Saigon. Sydney is unaware of his vast ignorance of Vietnamese culture and political reality, but after he becomes involved with French expatriate and rubber plantation owner Claude Armand and his wife, Dede, a native Chicagoan, Sydney gradually loses his hubris. Eventually, he realizes that the American goal of "nation building" in Vietnam is at best a tragic delusion and at worst a cynical grasp at power. Almost accidentally, Sydney becomes the conduit for information about a U.S. Army captain captured by the VC. Ensuing events result in the annihilation of a village of innocent Vietnamese, betrayal of the Armands and the ruin of the one truly moral member of the Llewellyn staff. In spite of his good intentions, Sydney has become, as Dede Armand says, "a dangerous friend." Just gives readers an incisive vision of America's end of innocence. He does so with strongly limned characters who do not forfeit their individuality even as they are overwhelmed by history. Author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Just's intelligent, compelling, and meticulously crafted fiction offers unexpected insights into the psychology of people obsessed with art or political intrigue and faced with circumstances that make pursuit of their passion, or addiction, difficult if not dire. An ever-evolving writer with a deep sense of global connectedness and the habitual abuse of power, Just has reached a new plateau in his twelfth novel, a work of subtle suspense and significant irony that penetrates hidden terrain similar to that explored by Conrad, Greene, and Didion. It takes place during the early, hubristic days of the war in Vietnam, when Americans, assured of their moral and material superiority, blindly staked out their turf. Brash, ignorant, and eager to escape a loveless marriage, Sydney Parade jumps at the chance to play hero and joins a shadowy foreign-aid operation. His meager qualifications include a loose connection to a Frenchman, Claude, and his American wife, Dede, who oversee a strategically located rubber plantation. Having almost jeopardized his position by alienating Claude's family before even setting foot in Vietnam, Sydney gallantly redresses his faux pas by saving Dede's life. Her and her husband's gratitude cannot, however, keep Sydney free from a web of lies and subterfuge that results in the murder of innocent civilians, and, on a personal level, his rapid and demoralizing disillusionment. Stealthily low-key, Just's quiet drama captures all the spiritual, ethical, and cultural misunderstandings that made the war in Vietnam, like so many other attempts at modern imperialism, so malignant, futile, and tragic. (Reviewed March 15, 1999)0395856981Donna Seaman
Kirkus评论
The former journalist, following last year's Echo House, returns to Vietnam, the subject of such earlier Just fiction as A Soldier of the Revolution (1970 ) and Stringer (1974). Just offers an ironic portrayal of American innocents undertaking ``nation-building'' in a land they don't understand: Saigon and environs in1965, when US presence is comparatively new, and when nonmilitary ``Llewellyn Group'' operative Sydney Parade arrives buoyed by visions of fruitful solidarity with Vietnamese hearts and minds, unaware that he's destined to become ``a dangerous friend'' to those who live ``in country.'' Prominent among the latter are French rubber-plantation owner Claude Armand and his American wife Dade, objects of interest to Sydney's boss Dicky Rostok, an ego-driven bureaucrat who's convinced the Armands somehow serve the Viet Cong in exchange for being left unmolested. The stage is thus set for multiple dramatic confrontations, though Just makes the novel predominantly a vehicle for static conversational variations on the theme of well-meaning US megalomania (``Reinvention is the opiate of Americans''). The result is a frustrating book: exquisitely written, charged with vivid images suggesting Vietnam's mingled beauty and danger, yet idling along for much of its length (and occasionally slipping into reverse), soliciting our interest in its rather vapid protagonist (the narrator who introduces Parade to us disappears early on) by repeatedly underscoring his marital failure and ingenuous yearning to be a part of the life of his time. Just picks up the pace in the last 50 pages, when a diplomatic plot to rescue a captured American officer both succeeds and fails, perversely destroying much of what people like the Armands have painstakingly built; the meaning of all being encapsulated in another stunning image, that of the strong young American as a powerless ``giant in the doll's house.'' In other words, America in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, Graham Greene already wrote this novel, The Quiet American, 40 years ago. Just's flawed, redundant variation on it is, on balance, disappointing.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Vietnam as a military story has been told time and again. In his 12th novel Just pursues the idealistic vision of American civilians who wanted to affect the history unfolding around them in 1965. Sydney Parade joins up with a group bent on capturing the minds and hearts of the South VietnameseÄin return for information, they offer civic improvements like building roads and providing roofs for churches. When news of a captured American captain reaches him, Sydney makes decisions that presage the hellishly difficult choices faced by the military later in the war. Just, whose Echo House (LJ 3/1/97) was a 1997 National Book Award nominee, is a fluent interpreter of the American psyche. His hauntingly sad motifs are beautifully balanced by the brash political posturing of his characters and his evocative descriptions of the Vietnamese countryside. A fresh and discerning reprise of a still-evolving American saga that will surely find devoted readers. For all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/99.]ÄBarbara Conaty, Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
| The Effort | p. 1 |
| The Family Armand | p. 13 |
| A Child in Such a Milieu | p. 37 |
| Dacy | p. 56 |
| Getting Used to It | p. 74 |
| A Shooting in the Market | p. 98 |
| Assimilate or Disperse | p. 118 |
| Big Dumb Blond | p. 140 |
| Plantation Louvet | p. 165 |
| The Life of the Mind | p. 185 |
| Pablo's Hat | p. 208 |
| The Arsenal of Democracy | p. 235 |