Paradise of the Blind

Duong Thu Huong

Duong Thu Huong is a veteran who spent ten years in the tunnels and air raid shelters of central Vietnam, the most heavily bomber area of her country. Huong emerged after the Vietnam war as one of the most widely read and celebrated novelists of her generation. But when her best selling novel Paradise of the Blind scandalized the party authorities in 1988 by depicting the disastrous, maoist style 1953-1956 land reform, Huong was publicly criticised and the work suddenly withdrawn from circulation. Again, like her hero, Duong Thu Huong found herself transformed overnight from patriot to pariah.Huong has not been allowed to publish any of her books in Vietnam since then.