Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel

Introduction

Introduction A pocalypse Hotel presents the reader with a world of sordid Hobbesian cruelty: distorted personalities prey on each other with gleeful malevolence; sex is a weapon, corruption a given, violence an amusement, and greed a cultivated norm. In spite of that grim litany the novel—brought out in 2002 by a daring and courageous editor at the Danang Publishing House after all other major, and even minor, publishers in the country refused to publish it—has sold more than 50,000 copies, and has had ten printings in Vietnam. Apocalypse was received enthusiastically by both the public and critics as a work of literary innovation: it achieved the seemingly contradictory feat of evoking nostalgia for the lost strengths and certainties of traditional Vietnamese culture through an experimental style and contemporaneous, bitterly humorous language that throws fantastical situations and a character with superhuman powers against a grimly realistic and undermining modern sensibility. The book generated over forty articles and book reviews, became the subject of several master’s and PhD theses in literature, and created the phenomenon of readers who would gleefully memorize and repeat certain choice sentences and passages among themselves. In 2003, the novel won an overwhelming majority of votes in the secret ballots (preliminary and final) of the Vietnam Writers Association awards jury, which should have meant winning the Association’s Best Book Award—the equivalent of the National Book Award in the United States—for that year. Yet the executive committee of the Association—under pressure from the Orwellian-named Committee of Ideology and Culture of the Party—vetoed the award, giving rise to protests to and within the Association and a scandal that was widely reported in the Vietnamese media. In tro duc tion viii The CI&C’s main criticisms of the novel concerned its depiction of sex and violence—and even the way the title itself smacked of both archaic religious sensibility and (in the word “apocalypse”) an implication of the cataclysmic end of an era or system.1 But it was perhaps the sense of perversity and bleakness that permeates the novel that the Committee found so disturbing and subversive—and that also may account most for the novel’s popularity, which the author contends stems from the book’s “frank reflection of a society at the beginning of market economy and the side effects of a consumer life.” “I wanted to write,” he said, “a powerful warning about a society torn by crimes and sins,” and he does, but he deliberately makes those crimes and sins so unrelentingly vicious and twisted as to be funny—the laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of funny that marks the best social satire. The market economy whose vicissitudes Ho Anh Thai lampoons in the novel was introduced to Vietnam in the mid-1980s, through the policy of doi moi (renovation), when it became clear that collectivization and stateowned enterprises were not working and had led to widespread poverty and starvation. It was a sea change in the country, one symbolized in the novel with a passage describing language instruction for privileged kids: At the time, if one studied English or French he was considered secondrate compared to those who studied Russian. Thế had had to intervene to get his son into the Russian class, which was for many people then the road to a paradise of thermoses, refrigerators, and pressure cookers. Entering the Russian course in the Russian department was a natural thing for privileged kids, and a real stroke of luck for kids from workingclass families. Phũ was able to switch into the class easily, and Thế was also easily able to secure him a spot on the team of students competing in the Russian Language Olympics, or send him to some university over there. But suddenly that paradise exploded in disorder and confusion like a mine blowing up among nobles, angels, and fairies. The day the masquerade ball finally ended, heaven simply reverted into a stretch of dry and desolate earth populated with make-believe princes and officials rushing to take off their disguises and switching to ordinary fare and clothing. That year, those that had just finished their university courses in Russian wisely made the decision to switch over to English and French, so they would have the chance to find work in the Western companies who were finally flooding into the country. It was a repeat of the way many had abandoned Chinese for other languages ten years [3.144.48.135] Project...