The New York Times Sunday Book Review Section included this piece titled “Reading Tim O’Brien in Hanoi,” where the writer, Matt Steinglass, investigates American War writers and their lack of popularity in Vietnam. An interesting read:
“Vietnamese authors should learn to tell their war stories the way O’Brien does,” Hieu said. “With parody, nonlinear plot exposition. The fusion of reality and dreams.”
It shouldn’t have been so hard to find Vietnamese who could talk about O’Brien. He is, after all, a seminal American novelist of the Vietnam War, and one would think his books — including “If I Die in a Combat Zone” (1973) and “Going After Cacciato” (1978) — would be reasonably well known to Vietnamese readers. They are not. In fact, almost none of the major American novels about the war are known to Vietnamese readers; they have not been translated and published here.
