Novel
Dumb Luck
Số đỏ
Vũ Trọng Phụng · 1936
Synopsis
Xuân, nicknamed the Redhead, retrieves balls on a tennis court in Hanoi, from which he is chased away for watching a woman undress. An unscrupulous vagrant, he finds himself carried along, from chance to misunderstanding, by the fashion for Europeanisation that grips the city's petty bourgeoisie: modern tailor, clinics, reforms, society mourning, he rises in a society that takes him seriously all the more readily because he is nothing.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in 1936, then in volume form, and has twenty chapters. It belongs to the three years in which its author produced the bulk of his work, between 1934 and 1937. Banned after 1954 and until the eighties, regarded as decadent naturalism, it is now on the syllabus of Vietnamese secondary schools, including a chapter on a society funeral. It was translated into English in 2002 by Peter Zinoman and Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm, and into French in 2007.
Who it is for
A short novel, of continuous satire. The characters are types rather than individuals, and the rhythm is that of farce rather than of the realist novel.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read and most discussed book of modern Vietnamese literature, long banned, then returned to readers and translated into several languages.