Des fantomes et des hommes.

Nguyen, Dinh-Hoa

"Phantoms and Men" by the forty-something author Nguyen Khac Truong, who lives and works in the capital city of Hanoi, is a novel about his native village of "Temple Well," a typical rural community in the Tonkinese midlands, with its river, hills, canals, and ricefields - and its age-old traditions. One of its typical customs was to require from several of its inhabitants a contribution of 200 bricks, to be used to pave the main pathway through the length of the village: a couple of newlyweds, a scholar who has passed his baccalaureate, a notable who has been promoted to the same level as the village mayor, and an unwed mother - all of them had to fulfill their obligations.

One year, a severe famine struck the relatively wealthy village: people had to feed themselves on manioc, sweet potatoes, and corn meal, to which was added the rice bran that normally was given only to pigs. The author very realistically describes an array of human beings from all walks of life: for instance, the former adjutant of the French period; old Quenh, who used to tend water buffaloes; "Mademoiselle" Thong Bieu, actually an effeminate sorcerer, who organized seances to chase away ghosts; Vu Dinh Dai, an accused landlord; the brothers Phuc and Quy, who fought over which of them would look after their aging father in compliance with the dictates of filial piety

The reader cannot help finding the hereditary feud between the Trinh Ba clan and the Vu Dinh clan very intriguing. The former, a carpenter's family, simply had to get even with the latter, who had desecrated the idolatrous image of a tiger, the patron saint of the Trinh Ba family. In turn, the family hired Tho, a drunkard and petty thief, to exhume the body of Vu Dinh Phuc's father, an act of enormously negative geomantic dimensions. Around a relationship not unlike that between Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets, the two hostile clans resorted to every trick and maneuver behind the bamboo hedge, amid a tense atmosphere, to keep the boy from eloping with his girlfriend from the other family.

The young people of the village were required to do menial tasks without pay: their corvees consisted in repairing roads, dredging canals, drying marshes, and detecting unvaccinated dogs. In the disciplined village hierarchy, the young citizens were completely repressed and never given the right to criticize their elders. When the village sorcerer died, Be, the working girl who got paid by the day, inherited from "Mlle" Thong Bieu the power of a Taoist medium, and the superstitious people around the village still lived in respect for the laws of Hades and believed in ghosts and goblins disguised as pretty women dancing in front of the communal hall or swinging from the lofty banyan tree.

In the new society of socialist Vietnam, things did not fare too well in the canton. A team of inspectors sent down from the district seat discovered that the co-op members had stolen seeds, insecticide, fertilizer, timber, bricks, and wheelbarrows from the public storage. When the animal-husbandry center was closed, pigs and chickens had been taken, and funds had been embezzled from the hydraulics project. Corrupted co-op members like the adjutant and his lover (Mine Ngat, a widow) pocketed profits of their own. Peasants still wanted "to keep up with the Nguyens," whether to have an expensive funeral for the paterfamilias or to campaign for the post of village mayor. Most ridiculous of all was the effort of Ngo Thi Xon - whose husband, a Trinh, had been accused of staging the desecration of a Vu grave - to seek Vu Dinh Phuc's agreement to have things arranged in the most constructive neighborly spirit. In her complaint, she wrote that Phuc tried to take advantage of her and talk her into "committing an immoral act" with him. Thus slander and counterslander were thrown back and forth in an appeal to the fairness of the people's tribunal.

The reader is led from Xon's suicide to the antics of the "shrewd and perverse" young medium, who spoke with "a ghost's voice." Be confided to the community what the sorcerer had told her on his deathbed: "Human beings now behave like baleful ghosts, and there is no amulet or talisman to exorcise the malefic creatures. The talismans which the genie had entrusted me with could be effective only against real ghosts; they can do nothing for people who behave like ghosts." Nguyen Khac Truong has provided an interesting and very well written story of ghosts and people, full of the cleverly cited proverbs and sayings and folk verses that are the distinctive features of vernacular Vietnamese.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen Southern Illinois University, Carbondale