Novel
When the Light Is Out
Tắt đèn
Ngô Tất Tố · 1937
Synopsis
In a delta village, the poll tax falls on the Dậu household. The husband is ill, beaten and put in irons; to get him out, his wife sells their eldest daughter and a litter of puppies to the notable's house, and there is still not enough to pay, because the tax of a brother who died the year before is also demanded. When the village men come back for her husband, she ends up standing up to them.
Context
Twenty-seven chapters, the eighteenth of which is still read in classrooms under the name of the adage that says that water pressed too hard bursts the dyke. The text first appeared as a serial in a Hanoi weekly in 1937, then in book form from Mai Lĩnh in 1939, with a preface by Vũ Trọng Phụng; the reissues of 1957 and 1962 were prefaced by two other leading writers. The heroine is called Lê Thị Đào, but the whole country knows her under her husband's name.
Who it is for
Short, in Northern Vietnamese. It assumes one knows what the capitation was, the tax that every adult man had to pay in person, living or dead.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read text of Vietnamese realism, translated into French as early as 1959 and into English the following year, adapted for the cinema in 1981.