The Wind Erases the Path Home (A novel by Ho Anh Thai)
Tin tức
03:06:12 12/12/2025Imagine that one day you find all the celebrities assumed to have died, been assassinated, or simply disappeared: men and women such as John F. Kennedy, Greta Garbo, and the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, are really still alive, held in a secret prison, disguised as a seafood factory on a country called Green Island in the Indian Ocean.
Imagine that one day you find all the celebrities assumed to have died, been assassinated, or simply disappeared: men and women such as John F. Kennedy, Greta Garbo, and the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, are really still alive, held in a secret prison, disguised as a seafood factory on a country called Green Island in the Indian Ocean.
Such is the setting of Ho Anh Thai’s fantastic new novel. The story begins when a Vietnamese professor comes to teach at the University of Green Island, and gradually befriends an eccentric Indian priest, the president’s son, and the Chinese director of the seafood factory. As the action unfolds, we become involved also with a large and strange cast of other characters, including a Sri Lankan girl looking for the lost leader of a rebel group and an American restaurateur, searching for his idol JFK. In the end, a coup d’etat led by the president’s son, ousts the president and he and all the inmates are packed onto a plane headed to JFK airport in New York, where their arrival will shock the world. But they never land, not at JFK, and not at any other airport in the world.
And Green Island itself disappears as if it never existed.
Love and hate, honesty and lies, friendship and greed, are all intertwined in this complex allegory. Just like all of the people on the island, their identities difficult to trace, the novel speaks to the traces of themselves that human beings have left behind and lost, so that they can never again go back to themselves.
Dau ve gio xoa
350 pages
Biography of Ho Anh Thai
(Wikipedia)
Ho Anh Thai is one of the best known contemporary writers in Vietnam, is regarded as a literary phenomenon of the post-war generation.
Ho Anh Thai was born in 1960 in Hanoi. He graduated from Hanoi Institute of Diplomacy in 1983. After graduation, he worked as a diplomat and journalist abroad, especially in India. Fluent in several foreign languages, he earned a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies and he is also a lecturer and an Indologist. At present he is working in the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is the elected president of Hanoi Writers’ Association.
Literary career
Ho Anh Thai first became known as a literary teenage prodigy with the publication of his first stories, and as he matured, became a voice for his generation, with his fresh, youthful style of writing, and works that centered on the lives and adventures of young people and students, highlighting their desire to discover the world. His emblematic works of this period are the novels Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight (1986), The Women on the Island (1986), Behind the Red Mist (1989) and the short story collections The Goat Meat Special (1988), Fragment of a Man (1991) etc. Early in the 1990s, after he had studied and worked abroad for some time, including six years in India, Ho Anh Thai published a series of unique, humorous and profound stories about that country: The Man Who Stood on One Leg, The Indian, A Sigh through the Laburnums, The Barter etc.
From the 2000s his published books became more experimental, playful in language and marked by a wry and sardonic tone that was both much appreciated by his growing readership and also considered controversial: the novels The Apocalypse Hotel (2002), The Hanoian Nights (2006) and short stories collections The Narration of 265 Days (2001), Four Paths to the Fun House (2004) etc.
Ho Anh Thai came back to the theme of India with the novel The Buddha, Savitri and I, published in 2007. This is the first Vietnamese novel which contemporizes the Buddha through an interesting plot and simple style set in a multi-layered structure which effectively broadens his use of time and space. Ho Anh Thai’s books have always been best-sellers; part of the phenomenon of his work is that he has a large readership in spite of the way he has eschewed formulaic writing and strives for freshness and originality in form and language.
His fiction has been published abroad, translated into over ten languages, including English, French, Swedish etc.
Main Works
- The Boy Who Waits at the Bus-stop (Chang trai o ben doi xe, 1985)
- Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight (Nguoi va xe chay duoi anh trang, 1986)
- The Women on the Island (Nguoi dan ba tren dao, 1986)
- The Searchs (Nhung cuoc kiem tim, 1988)
- Behind the Red Mist (Trong suong hong hien ra, 1989)
- Fragment of a Man (Manh vo cua dan ong, 1991)
- The Man Who Stood on One Leg (Nguoi dung mot chan, 1995)
- The Bastards (Lu con hoang, 1995)
- A Sigh through the Laburnums (Tieng tho dai qua rung kim tuoc, 1998)
- They have Become My Characters (Ho tro thanh nhan vat cua toi, 2000)
- The Narration in 265 Days (Tu su 265 ngay, 2001)
- The Apocalypse Hotel (Coi nguoi rung chuong tan the, 2002)
- Four Paths to the Fun House (Bon loi vao nha cuoi, 2004)
- The Hanoian Nights (Muoi le mot dem, 2006)
- The Buddha, Savitri and I (Duc Phat, nang Savitri va toi, 2007)
- Namaskar! Hail India (Namaskar! Xin chao An Do, 2008)
- Hanoi is Embraced by the Rivers (Huong nao Ha Noi cung song, 2009)
- MHT Means Mouse Hunting Team (SBC la san bat chuot, 2011)
Awards
- Short story prize 1983-1984 of Van Nghe (Literature and Arts) newspaper for The Boy Who Waits at the Bus-stop.
- Best novel award (5-year award, 1986–1990) of the Vietnam Writers’ Association and the Vietnam Trade Union for Men and Vehicle Run in the Moonlight.
- Literature award 1995 of the Union of Literature and Art Associations for The Man Who Stood on One Leg.
- Annual prize 2002 of the Vietnam Writers’ Association for The Narration in 265 Days (refused by author).
External links
Ho Anh Thai:
- http://www.curbstone.org/authdetail.cfm?AuthID=37
- http://www.congrexnetwork.com/dbs/waltic/dyncat.cfm?catid=190#ho
Behind the Red Mist:
- http://www.curbstone.org/bookdetail2.cfm?BookID=49&view=BL
- http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/bib/981101.rv154952.html
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