Novel
Bỉ vỏ
Not translated into English
Nguyên Hồng · 1938
Synopsis
Bính, a poor girl from the village of Sòi, falls in love with a land-registry clerk who abandons her when she is pregnant. Driven out by her family and separated from her child, she makes her way to the port of Hải Phòng, where she soon has nothing left to sell but herself: brothel, prison, street. There she is taken in by a thief of the port, whose wife and soon accomplice she becomes, and the book follows her in that world, with its slang, its rules and its hierarchies.
Context
Its author had begun it again at least five times and finished it on 26 April 1937, at the age of nineteen, in the slums of the Cấm district where he lived among the dockworkers. The manuscript received that same year the prize of the Tự Lực văn đoàn group, a distinction reserved for authors outside the group and which launched several first books. The argot of the dock thieves, which the title itself borrows, is used without gloss, to the point that modern editions provide a glossary of it.
Who it is for
Short, in Northern Vietnamese, and difficult by its very language. Poverty is described without restraint, and nothing is explained to the passing reader.
Prizes and reception
Awarded a prize in 1937, it made its author a name overnight and remains the most widely read of his books.