Novel
Truyện thầy Lazaro Phiền
Not translated into English
Nguyễn Trọng Quản · 1887
Synopsis
On a boat, a traveller receives the confession of a man who knows he is doomed. Twenty years earlier, an anonymous letter had told him that his wife was deceiving him with his best friend, and he had believed it. He tells what he did with that certainty, the years he then spent in the religious habit, and what he understood too late. The whole story lies in these words of a dying man, as reported by the one who heard them.
Context
The book appeared from J. Linage, bookseller-publisher in rue Catinat, in Saigon. In a preface dated 1 December 1886 and written in French to a comrade and the other Annamites of the lycée of Algiers, the author says he wanted to make a story with the words everyone uses when speaking. The action takes place between Bà Rịa, Vũng Tàu, Đất Đỏ and the town. The book was rediscovered by critics in the seventies and reissued in 1987, then in an anthology of southern prose in 2005.
Who it is for
Short, about fifty pages. The language is that of the South in 1887, and everything rests on a confession made from beginning to end.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the starting point of modern Vietnamese prose, forty years before the novel long held to be the first; it went without readers for decades.