Past Continuous (Voices from Vietnam)
Winner of the National Prize for Fiction in 1982, Nguyen Khai is  a distinguished Vietnamese author with more than 30 books to his  credit. This "documentary novel," originally published in the  early 1980s and inspired by real people and real events,  provides a different angle on the Vietnam War via the story of  three friends: Ba Hue, a female commander of the Viet Cong;  Quan, a North Vietnamese secret agent; and Vinh, a Catholic  priest. Intense and highly political, the novel uses an unnamed  narrator, an acquaintance of all three characters, as a medium  to piece together their interspersed stories. However, by  breaking up the characterization, the author makes the work  difficult for general readers to follow. American readers, too,  may perceive historical discrepancies in the novelization as  being deliberate inaccuracies, but, as Karlin points out in the  afterword, these discrepancies result not from an intentional  distortion of history but from a difference in perspective  between the Vietnamese and the Americans. Overall, this work is  best suited to academic libraries, historical or Asian studies  collections, and libraries already owning other titles in the  series. Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CACopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.