Throughout her short married life, Linh idolized her husband Nguyen as the embodiment of the highest ideals. She had believed that his rock-solid integrity in his work as a journalist and his commitment to higher principles had been rewarded with the comfortable material life their young family enjoyed. Then Linh discovered the truth.
Nguyen had been shamelessly pandering to his cadre editors, whitewashing disasters caused by ill-conceived Communist Party planning, and writing them up as yet another grand success in Vietnam's heroic march toward communism.
He was a willing and enthusiastic lackey pitied and scorned by his colleagues. Now that Nguyen was torn from his pedestal in her mind, she could no longer respect this man, much less love him. But then now what?
Duong Thu Huong, Vietnam's most prominent dissident author, begins her newly translated novel Beyond Illusions with this painful predicament, before dragging readers through the wrenching breakdown of the couple's marriage.
As young lovers, Linh and Nguyen's bond was based on a mutual rejection of materialism for a spiritually fulfilling existence, a kind of starry-eyed idealism that distinguished the two from the greedy and depraved masses. But the practical realities of life and the pressure on men to provide for wife and family unsurprisingly pushed Nguyen to bend his principles for their sake.
In this light, it's easy to sympathize with Nguyen's weakness of character since the alternative would probably mean living in grinding poverty. However, Linh makes it clear she never desired nor asked for material comfort and her only flaw, if it can be called such, is that she so stubbornly stands by her lofty principles.
What we the readers get is a front-row seat to the messy process of Linh's severing of ties with Nguyen and starting a new life in a society that frowns upon divorce and in a political system that creeps into every aspect of people's lives.
Huong is brilliant at conveying the guilt, anger, shame and confusion that are the context for Linh and Nguyen's short-lived rebound affairs -- Linh with a celebrity who is every bit as phony as her husband and Nguyen with a sexually liberated fellow journalist -- and holding out the faint possibility that the two will eventually come around and fall back in love. But very little in this book gives reason for hope or laughs.
Even Linh, who loudly proclaims to stand for truth and to revile artifice, becomes so completely smitten of her famous music composer lover Tran Phuong that she manages to rationalize his philandering and hypocrisy. On top of this, the man who most clearly fits her description of a moral and worthy man, a vagabond artist, lingers in the background of the story without ever grabbing her attention. It all makes her abandonment of Nguyen and her family seem heartless.
The confusion that Huong creates in Linh's mind is ultimately an affirmation of the power of the heart to lead the mind astray and of the struggle not to be overwhelmed by the heart. In this fight, Linh comes out the hero.
As a dissident writer, Huong is also taking shots at Vietnam's political establishment throughout the novel so that it's easy to see why the country's famously thin-skinned and insecure officials saw it necessary to throw her in jail for almost a year in 1991.
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