Book Tour/ Her: The Flame Tree by Khanh Ha
Category: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Vietnam
Tour dates: January 16-Feb 23, 2024
Publisher:
Her: The Flame Tree by Khanh Ha is a love triptych that sweeps through the rich panorama of two generations of colonial and post-colonial Vietnam. The hopeless love of a young eunuch for a high-ranking concubine is one of this novel’s three stories that illuminate the oriental mystery of Vietnam, as epic as it is persevering, Framed between 1915 and 1993, the book begins in Huế, the former imperial capital of Vietnam. It is in the Purple Forbidden City, that Canh, the young eunuch, fulfills his vow to be near the girl of his dreams, a villager-turned imperial concubine.
The novel begins with an expatriate Vietnamese man living in the United States who journeys back to Vietnam to search for the adopted daughter of a centenarian eunuch of the Imperial Court of Huế to find out who she really is. His world takes on a new meaning after he becames a part of her life.
Phượng. Her name is the magnificent flame tree’s flowers that grace the ancient capital of Huế. Her father, mentor of Canh the young eunuch, was a hundred-year-old grand eunuch of the Imperial Court, who had adopted and raised her since she was a baby. Their peaceful world suddenly changed when one day, sometime in the early years of the Vietnam war, Jonathan Edward came into their lives. On his quest to search for his just deceased lover’s mysterious birth, there he met Phượng, an exquisite beauty.
Through the eye of her father, history is retold. Just before the fall of the French Indochina during the last dynasty of Vietnam, a young eunuch hopelessly fell in love with a high-ranking concubine. Once the eunuch had secured the concubine’s trust, it became a fatal attraction. The eunuch died. The concubine, still a virgin, lost her mind. Her father said she was possessed by the young eunuch’s spirit who had been madly in love with her.
My comments:
I was amazed by the book's background history of the ancient city of Hue and its Imperial dynasty that existed before 1945. I found "The Imperial City was built in 1362 and in 1993 was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Between these two periods of time, the city even served as the capital of Vietnam from 1802 to 1945 during the reign of the Nguyen dynasty." (from Backpackers Wanderlust).
The book focuses on stories of Phuong, the adopted daughter of a eunuch of the Imperial Court of Hue. Her father, the grand eunuch for 63 years, and the emperor's last concubine, An-Phi, had a love story that ended sadly. An-Phi, as a civilian in later years, roamed the streets, mad, giving away her jewels.
The book tells, through the stories about the adopted daughter of the eunuch, Phuong, the history of Vietnam from the Imperial times through the French occupation. The other main character is the American Vietnamese boy, Jonathan Edward, who had come to Vietnam to find the parents of his deceased girlfriend, a half Vietnamese-half French girl, only to fall in love with Phuong and die tragically in her arms.
The book is long and approaches this portion of Vietnamese history in an indirect way, by telling stories of different people and their lives affected by the country's history. It's a book to savor slowly, and worthwhile to capture the flavor of the country, old and new.
On Death Scenes
©Khanh Ha
It happens. Somebody dies. Death can occur in the middle or the end of a novel. Someone’s death could spin the story around. It could be the protagonist’s death.
Each writer writes his death scene with trepidation.
How much should he write it without overwriting it?
Some death scenes are so memorable they never leave
your memory as long as you read books. Here is the scene in the ending of A
Farewell to Arms (Earnest Hemingway) that captures the moment after the
death of the protagonist’s lover in a hospital. The doctor then offers to take
him back to his hotel.
“Good night,” he said. “I
cannot take you to your hotel?”
“No, thank you.”
“It was the only thing to do,” he said. “The operation proved—"
“I do not want to talk about it,” I said.
“I would like to take you to your hotel.”
“No, thank you.”
He went down the hall. I went to the door of the room.
“You can’t come in now,” one of the nurses said.
“Yes, I can,” I said.
“You can’t come in yet.”
“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”
But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it
wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went
out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
To date, I have always thought that the best prose
ever written in the English language is found in the opening and the ending of A
Farewell to Arms. And if you are keen enough as a reader, you will notice
its influence on Cormac McCarthy’s prose especially in his award-winning novel All
The Pretty Horses.
That brings us to Cormac McCarthy whose hero in All
The Pretty Horses meets his death in Cities of The Plain, last book
of the trilogy. In this scene, John Grady Cole lies dying from a knife wound
and his friend, Billy Parker, goes out to get Cole a glass of water. When he
comes back, death has taken his friend away.
When he got to the
packingcrate the candle was still burning and he took the glasses both in one
hand and pushed back the sacking and crouched on his knees.
Here you go, bud, he said.
But he had already seen. He set the waterglasses slowly down. Bud, he said,
Bud?
The boy lay with his face turned away from the light. His eyes were open.
Billy called to him. As if he could not have gone far. Bud, he said, Bud? Aw
goddamn. Bud?
Aint that pitiful, he said. Aint that the most goddamn pitiful thing? Aint
it? Oh God. Bud. Oh goddamn.
When he had him gathered in his arms he rose and turned. Goddamn whores, he
said. He was crying and his tears ran down his angry face and he called out to
the broken day against them all and he called out to God to see what was before
his eyes. Look at this, he called. Do you see? Do you see?
In Her: The Flame Tre, I wrote a novel whose
ending witnesses the death of the main character. He is shot and dies in his
lover’s arms.
He fell. The lights glared
beyond. He got up, fell, and got up again. He saw lights wildly searching the
darkness and heard voices descending on him.
She cradled him, weeping. He
woke as if to a whitewashed memory and in that moment he knew all that he had
lived through. He saw her eyes and her face as if he had never left her, as if
nothing had happened or changed, like the smell of the earth.
“Jonathan! Speak to me,
Jonathan!”
She turned him on his side
so her warmth would keep him awake.
“Hold on, Jonathan. Just
hold on.”
Red hot pain dimpled his
back, so hot his breath seemed to flame. He felt her hands touching his back
and saw they were red when she covered her mouth.
“Wrap him. Stop the
bleeding,” someone said, hovering over him.
A monk. He knew the face,
but the name didn’t come. Hands touching him. His body no longer seemed to
belong to him. He felt an energy shrouding him and a deafening commotion
without sound. He saw a young girl who smiled as she walked hand in hand with
him through a valley yellow and red with autumn. He saw cranes sleeping in the
lagoon at low tide, and among their mirrored white bodies he saw himself
cloaked in white.
She pressed her cheek against
his. “Jonathan.”
He closed his eyes; the
scent of the earth came to him. He saw her eyes very close to his, then his
head fell against her chest. The dimple of pain went away.
About Khanh Ha
Author Khanh Ha is a nine-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for The Ohio State University Fiction Collection Prize, Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, Prize Americana, and The Santa Fe Writers Project. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, The Gival Press Novel Award, and The Red Hen Press Fiction Award.
Website: http://www.authorkhanhha.com
Blog: http://authorkhanhha.blogspot.com
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