Novel
Đoạn tuyệt
Not translated into English
Nhất Linh · 1934
Synopsis
Loan is educated, she reads, she has ideas of her own and she loves Dũng. Her family marries her to Thân to settle a debt. Having entered her mother-in-law's great house, she is judged there on her belly, on her reading, on everything that makes her different, and ordered to fall into line. She does not, and the house closes in on her until the day a quarrel turns bad and brings her before a court.
Context
The book first appeared in instalments in the group's weekly, in 1934, then in book form the following year from the house its members had founded by selling shares at five hundred piastres. It is a novel with a thesis and does not hide it: each scene is arranged to establish that the old domestic order crushes those who do not submit to it, and the final trial gives the demonstration its platform. The group was then waging the same campaign in its newspapers, through caricature and pamphlet.
Who it is for
About two hundred pages, in Vietnamese. The language is deliberately simple, that was the group's programme; the thesis, however, is heavily underlined, and one sees each demonstration coming.
Prizes and reception
The most discussed title of Vietnamese prose of the thirties, and the one through which the novel of ideas entered the country.