Short stories
Kép Tư Bền
Not translated into English
Nguyễn Công Hoan · 1935
Synopsis
A comic actor must go on stage before an audience waiting for him, on the evening his father is dying at home: he performs, and the audience laughs. Around this story, the collection arranges others, just as brief, in which pass notables, moneylenders, petty clerks and beggars. Each runs to a few pages, starts from a funny situation and closes on a twist that overturns the laughter, often in the last paragraph.
Context
The collection appeared in the spring of 1935, in the very months when an article by Hải Triều, published in March in a Huế newspaper, opened the quarrel that divided Vietnamese letters between those who wanted art for its own sake and those who wanted it for life; the latter claimed this book as theirs. Its author had been writing stories for the press since 1923, and the mechanism is always the same: a comic situation carried through to the punchline, where laughter uncovers what it was hiding.
Who it is for
Short, in Northern Vietnamese. The stories are taken one at a time, the punchline matters more than the plot, and one needs to know a little about colonial society.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author's reputation; he has been regarded ever since as the master of the satirical short story in Vietnam.