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The Mountain of Perfumes
Publisher
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Phébus
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782221079645
Number of pages
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458
Description
Before the United States entered into war with Vietnam, the country was embattled by France. The Vietnamese children born at the beginning of that war grew from childhood to adulthood never knowing peace. This is the story of one such child, a boy whose fate mirrors the history of Vietnam in the twentieth century.
Pedro Nguyên Long was born in 1933, hidden in a cave in the Mountain of Perfumes during a French air raid. He spent his early years with his middle-class family, in the port city of Haiphong.
After 1945, however, the city, under attack by the French, is no longer safe; and along with many others, the family takes refuge in the countryside. By then the revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, has established the Communist-governed Democratic Republic of Vietnam and furthered the war with France. Haiphong becomes the setting of a terrible massacre, and even more people flee to the country. It is there that Pedro, then only sixteen, becomes estranged from his father and his bourgeois background by joining a group involved in spreading the Communist platform.
The country, the politics, the war turn and spin . . . Pedro and his father are eventually reconciled, and his father tries to help his son escape to safety once again. But on the way to their mountain refuge, Pedro is caught by French soldiers, found carrying his Communist party card, tortured, and imprisoned. He is soon released and moves with his family to Saigon.
He turns from war to acting, and in 1953 he becomes an assistant to Joseph Mankiewicz on the film The Quiet American, set in prewar Indochina. In 1956, his first screenplay, We Want to Live, is made into a movie. His work makes it possible for him to go West, traveling first to Italy, then to the United States, and finally to France, where he settles. He cannot imagine returning to the restricted life in Vietnam, but it is never far from his thoughts. He becomes the head film editor for Radio et Télévision Française and makes documentaries for NBC about his country and the horrors his family experienced there. In 1965 his father dies of cancer before Pedro is able to see him again. That death and the lack of contact make Pedro resolve to reunite his family. Twenty years later, they all gather—shaped and scarred by the Vietnamese wars—at his brother’s house in Los Angeles.
Author
Pédro Long Nguyên :
Pedro Nguyên Long was born in 1933 in Haiphong. In the mid-1950s, he settled in France, where he was named chief film editor at Radio et Télévision Française. There he met such figures as Roland Dumas and Pierre Schoendoerffer, with whom he would work on the prize-winning film Section Anderson (1964).
Georges Walter is a French writer and journalist.
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