{"id":3791,"date":"2020-09-19T04:38:10","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T11:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3791"},"modified":"2020-09-19T04:38:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T11:38:10","slug":"libby-fischer-hellman-a-bend-in-the-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/libby-fischer-hellman-a-bend-in-the-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Libby Fischer Hellman: A Bend in the River"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Libby Hellman is known for her slightly gritty mysteries set in Chicago, often reaching back into the past.\u00a0 Her first novel, An Eye for Murder <\/em>(2002) looked back to the holocaust; she\u2019s ventured to Cuba, to the 60\u2019s in the United States, to WWII, and to Iran.\u00a0 This is her first novel, however, that\u2019s straight up history. She sets it in Vietnam in 1968, during the war.\u00a0 As someone who came of age in the late 70\u2019s, the Vietnam War wasn\u2019t history.\u00a0 It was news.\u00a0 It was classmates wearing POW and MIA bracelets<\/a>.\u00a0 It was on TV and in the newspapers almost every day.<\/p>\n

In 2020, the war, which began with an infusion of \u201cadvisors\u201d under President Kennedy and ended in 1975 under President Ford, is <\/em>now history.\u00a0 The story Hellman is telling is historical. In 1968, her two main characters, sisters Tam and Mai, see their family and village wiped out.\u00a0 They are young but fierce and they steal a sampan and head to Saigon.\u00a0 To Tam, it seems to make sense, as US soldiers are headed to Cambodia, not Saigon.<\/p>\n

The sisters ultimately get a ride and a bit of a hand and start work in a restaurant, living in a tent in a refugee camp on the edge of town.\u00a0 The two sisters have different ideas about their futures.\u00a0 Mai, the younger, wants a softer, more feminine life.\u00a0 She\u2019s interested in glamor, clothes, and men.\u00a0 Tam is the scholar of the family; she\u2019d wanted to study botany before the war stole her family. She\u2019s more serious and more interested in politics.<\/p>\n

When Mai decides to take a job as a \u201cbar hostess\u201d chatting up American soldiers and convincing them to order more drinks, her sister says she will suffer when the war is over for consorting with the enemy.\u00a0 Tam goes the other way.\u00a0 She\u2019s recruited by the Viet Cong and trains to work as a driver, delivering supplies to the vast network of tunnels known as the Ho Chi Minh trail.<\/a><\/p>\n

The scenes where Tam learns to navigate the roads and jungles in her truck at night, quickly delivering supplies, reminded me of every book I\u2019ve ever read about resistance fighters in France during WWII.\u00a0 In WWII we were on the right side; in Vietnam, we weren\u2019t.\u00a0 The U.S. was in a far away place trying to change a way of government, while bombing and pillaging their country, leaving the fields razed and ruined by Agent Orange.\u00a0 While I knew this intellectually, Hellman\u2019s novel brought it home to me in an emotionally resonant way that made me think about it differently.<\/p>\n

In creating Mai and Tam, yes, they are opposites and could have easily been cardboard figures, but as Hellman writes about their lives and follows their hardships and the way they change and mature as they age, they both become more shaded and more nuanced.\u00a0 The narrative is propulsive (I read this in about a day and a half), and so are the characters.\u00a0 I cared about them and wanted to know what was going to happen to them.<\/p>\n

Neither woman ever gets a chance to take a breath.\u00a0 They are hardly able to process the loss of their family, much less the other events that overtake them throughout the novel.\u00a0 Hellman follows them to the end of the war and their eventual reunion (not a spoiler, it\u2019s on the back cover).\u00a0 While their lives race onward, we as readers can think about them and consider what\u2019s happening to them from the perspective of history. The way the two sisters\u2019 fates and fortunes wax and wane and the ultimate resolution of the book is heartbreaking, memorable, and has real strength.\u00a0 This is a wonderful story as well as a powerful history lesson.\u00a0 It can be read either \u2013 or both \u2013 of those ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Libby Hellman is known for her slightly gritty mysteries set in Chicago, often reaching back into the past.\u00a0 Her first novel, An Eye for Murder (2002) looked back to the holocaust; she\u2019s ventured to Cuba, to the 60\u2019s in the United States, to WWII, and to Iran.\u00a0 This is her first novel, however, that\u2019s straight … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[421,10,419,420],"class_list":["post-3791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-a-bend-in-the-river","tag-historical","tag-libby-fischer-hellman","tag-viet-nam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3793,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3791\/revisions\/3793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}