Reading Tim O'Brien in Hanoi

Do the Vietnamese read stories about the Vietnam War from people who aren't Vietnamese? The New York Times has a story by Matt Steinglass who trolled the streets of Hanoi looking for someone who had read Tim O'Brien's famous novel, The Things They Carried.

From the piece...

To some extent, the lack of familiarity stems from censorship. Vietnam today is in many ways a rather open society; Vietnamese can surf the Internet (though writing blogs on political topics can get you arrested), foreign television streams in via satellite and cable, and pirated DVDs circulate freely. But when it comes to books, the old Communist machinery of censorship remains in place.

But censorship is only part of the story. Vietnamese also seem largely uninterested in foreign accounts of the war. For example, Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” is available in translation, but most Vietnamese I’ve spoken to dislike it. They find the book’s main Vietnamese character, the beautiful Phuong, demeaning in her passivity. The lack of interest extends to movies, too. You can purchase a copy of “Apocalypse Now” at any DVD store in Hanoi, but even the Vietnamese film buffs I’ve asked have not seen it. Last year, Vietnam’s first chain of modern multiplexes showed two movies one would never have expected to make it past the censors: “Watchmen,” which includes a sequence in which an American superhero ensures that Nixon wins the war, and “Tropic Thunder,” a parody of serious Vietnam films like “Platoon.” Audiences here yawned at both.

And speaking of the war, has Karl Marlantes written the last great Vietnam War novel? The Daily Beast answers that question.