(GLO) - It's been a long time since I read a war novel so intense and brutal. It's "The Ninth Hour" by writer Nguyen Mot. The setting stretches from a central province—the most brutal part of the war—to a southeastern region, the gateway to Saigon. The time is several years before 1975. And the characters are peasant families in that brutal region and the people of a place called Thu Bien.
Of course, the main characters are still young people, whose lives will be tossed and battered by war, even though they still live, still love, and still exist, each with their own fate and circumstances.
Nguyen Mot was a witness to that war, because he lived in that brutal region, and his family suffered the most horrific aspects of it. His parents were killed by bullets right before his eyes when he was a young boy, which shows him what war was like. He had to follow his uncle to another land and took his uncle's surname, treating him as a father. His personal circumstances are subtly reflected in that story, and of course, it was also the situation of the entire nation at that time.
A farming family simply wanted to live peacefully, farming and tending their fields, surrounded by friendly buffaloes. But then war broke out, and they split into... three factions. One faction wanted peace and quiet, determined to force their sons to avoid military service. Of course, that was the parents' "faction." The brothers, however, split into two factions. They didn't split themselves; circumstances forced them to. Guns, bombs, artillery... there are many chilling passages to read. Human beings emerged from those chaotic nights of bombing. The climax was the night when three sons, divided into two factions within the family, all died in a major clash. And the way the two sides organized funerals for their fallen soldiers was also deeply moving.
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The work "The Sixth to the Ninth Hour" by writer Nguyen Mot. Photo: VCH |
With over 300 pages, Nguyen Mot leads us through incredibly suspenseful situations, yet strangely, the suspense is calm and composed. The characters' fates are both thrilling and ordinary, their personalities clashing sharply but still tolerant of each other. There are tragedies, some heart-wrenching... but they are all resolved, both by the author's skillful plot development and by his humanistic nature and his ever-looking perspective. Therefore, in the end, most of them return and meet again. The ending is quite unexpected after all the mysterious and ambiguous hints.
There were poignant reunions, and heartbreaking, incomplete reunions. But even amidst the brutal and savage war, there was still beautiful love, truly beautiful. Whether on one side or the other, love was beautiful. It was pure and innocent, despite the hardships, the adversities, the awkwardness, the inexplicable circumstances… but ultimately, reason prevailed, leading to a happy ending. Wasn't Trang and Tâm's love beautiful? Beautiful and fierce. Fierce even in their reunion, amidst tears and pain, yet beautiful. Beautiful to the point of heartbreak. Wasn't Sơn Diễm's love beautiful? Even though it sometimes made our hearts race. It was beautiful in a… Nguyễn Một way, meaning dreamy, unreal, unconventional, too beautiful, too fragile, too weak amidst the roar of battle.
Nguyen Mot has an exceptional memory. He recounts many details from the 1975 era with remarkable accuracy. He even quotes many verses by his favorite poet, Nguyen Tat Nhien.
I deliberately chose not to summarize this novel, because doing so would diminish its enjoyment, especially the suspense created by the author's skillful storytelling. I will only recall a few impressions after I put the book down, after two days of reading and a sleepless night afterward. I barely slept, and even when I did doze off, the haunting images of the book, the haunting images of war, resurfaced. My generation and I were born and raised during wartime. I witnessed the war of destruction in the North, and after 1975, I returned to my hometown in Hue to witness the war, which had just ended, still vividly recalling the circumstances of my relatives and family members who had just gone through the war. Nguyen Mot experienced the war in the South; he was a direct "character" in the war. I visited Nguyen Mot's hometown and listened to him recount his extraordinary life story, from a young boy sleeping with his mother who witnessed her being shot dead right before his eyes, to living with his uncle, who had once been very poor but raised him to adulthood. Even while working as a teacher, he still had to find time to sell ice cream, and then he became a journalist and writer as he is today.
It wasn't until the final lines of the novel that I understood what the sixth and ninth hours had to do with the story he had chosen as the title of the novel. It's a verse from the Bible: "At about the sixth hour, darkness covered the land until the ninth hour. The sun became dark, and the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom..."
I sensed Nguyen Mot's calmness, tolerance, and humanistic perspective on war and humanity in this novel, so the brutality, the violence, the sorrow, the humiliation... ultimately moved us, easing the suffocation, even though there was reunion, there was also separation. It's like the way the main character, Son, realizes the mystical twilight color of the river...
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