Another excellent collection of short stories from Curbstone Press that I was fortunate enough to extract from the ANU Menzies Library. The translations by Dana Sachs are fantastic. I skipped the ones I'd read before, which may indeed have been the best:
- Crossing the river
- The general retires
- Without a king
- Salt of the jungle
- Fired gold
- Life's so fun
- Remembrance of the countryside
- Lessons from the countryside
- My Uncle Hoat
- The winds of Hua Tat: Ten stories in a small mountain village
- A drop of blood
- A sharp sword
- Chastity
- Rain
- Love story told on a rainy night
Thiệp spent some of his life in the mountains north-west of Hà Nội, and this story covers some of the same ground as Balaban did perhaps twenty years earlier: the Golden triangle, opium smuggling, customs officers and so forth.
"What do you know about love?" asked Bac Ky Sinh.
Trieu Phu Dai sighed. "It's an unscrupulous emotion."
- The water nymph
This is the best account of post-1975 peasant life I've read, I think, with the poverty grinding on towards the year 2000.
- The woodcutters
Greg Lockhart translated some of these stories more than a decade (1991) before this collection (2003). There seems to have been an argument about how to (de)classify Thiệp's work along Western lit crit lines. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Third time through, four years later. It's certainly time for Brick II, or at least for Mr Brick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to be in something else worth watching.
The things you learn from IMDB: Mr Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is the vice principal. The director Rian Johnson has a pile of stuff at his website. I just wish he'd made another noir, rather than a not-so-hot screwball.