Reviews

FICTION

The Other Side of Heaven

Edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue & Truong Vu

Curbstone Press, 1995

Reviewed by Moira Farrow

The guns fell silent 20 years ago but only now has the reconciliation between America and Vietnam become so warm that t can produce a joint volume of fiction. "The Other Side of Heaven" is the book and it is a splendid way to continue healing the wounds of war. This anthology of post-war fiction is also probably a first in literary history because it was both written and edited by former enemies. Editors Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu have packed 37 short stories into this fat paperback (411 pages) as well as brief biographies of the contributors and translators.

"This book was born out of the meeting of two people who, if they had met 20 years previously, would have tried to kill each other," writes U.S. co-editorand ex-Marine Karlin in the introduction.

The standard of writing in such an ambitious project will inevitably be uneven and it is here. Some stories are gripping, others are quickly forgettable. But the vast majority are well worth reading and provide an extraordinary glimpse of how the war affected -- and is still affecting -- both Americans and Vietnamese in their civilian lives.

For me the book would be worth the price for one story alone -- "Nada" by Puerto Rican-born writer Judith Ortiz Cofer. This account of the grief of a widow learning that her only son has been killed in Vietnam is agonizingly beautiful because she deals with sorrow in such a bizarre but understandable way. Others in the woman's Puerto Rican community somewhere in America struggle in vain to help her until the story reaches its Greek-tragedy-like conclusion. Then there's "The House Behind the Temple of Literatura" by Tran Vu who now lives in France. His many-layered story seems, at first sight, to be a sad account of a daughter returning to visit her elderly parents and grandfather and finding rejection instead of welcome. But the final pages reveal unimaginable horror caused by long-ago treachery.

The contents of three wooden locker boxes stacked in the family tool shed have long intrigued a 16-year-old Illinois boy in "Marine Corps Issue." When he furtively pries them open, in this story by David McLean, the boy gradually gets to know his mysterious father who returned from Vietnam with damaged hands and a determination not to talk about the war.

The subjects of these stories are enormously varied even though they spring from the same roots. There's "Tony D" by Le Minh Khue about two Hanoi hustlers finding the bones of a dead American who then begins to haunt them. There's Ngo Tu Lap's "Waiting for a Friend" told by the ghost of a dead North Vietnamese soldier who, with his other dead squad mates, watches the mourning of the lone survivor of their unit and knows they will be reunited one day. And then there's Philip Caputo's "A Soldier's Burial" in which a shell-shocked veteran, unemployed back in the U.S., terrifies his wife by spending his days talking to his three dead buddies who had been blown up by a booby-trapped bomb.

"Will any of this do any good?" asks Karlin in his introduction. He concludes that the answer may be no, judging from the "fascination of war" that grips the world in this last decade of the world's bloodiest century. "But none of this excuses those of us who know, and who make our living by telling stories, from telling what we know."

Karlin is right -- so it's up to the reading public to listen. Some may say they have heard enough about this war but this book is not about fighting. Rather, it is about the aftermath of war, its impact on the soldiers and civilians who got caught in the crossfire. There's much to leam in these stories, much to ponder and much to enjoy.