An important memoir about Vietnam, although I found the multiple time frames hard to track. ( )

This is a gripping tale of the author's father. The language and imagery are beautiful or bittersweet. And at times, the writing is utterly poetic and read like a fiction in terms of pacing and rhythm. I learned a lot about about Vietnamese history during the French colonial period, Japanese occupation during WWII and the Vietnam War.

I can't say this story was optimistic--it was bracing certainly. It is about survival and the anguish of a people trying to shake the shackles of colonialism and the aftermath of being a pawn. The author's father is likely portrayed as too faultless and too humble at varying times but that is the rightful privilege of an elder recounting his memories.

I do think that adding how the family left Vietnam would have completed the book in a better way, perhaps in an afterward. Having read Catfish and Mandala, I vaguely recall that the author did write about their leaving Vietnam and also about how he and his father had a distant or fractured relationship (and certainly we see how that was partly intergenerational).
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Andrew Pham writes for his father, in first person narrative, of his life from childhood to middle adulthood. This time also coincides with the WWII Japanese invasion of Vietnam, the war for independence from France, and the war with the US. The author is a true wordsmith. The writing is lyrical, sensual, and flows beautifully with descriptions of the natural world, the people, and their relationships.

The chapters alternate between his father's childhood and young adulthood. I found this difficult to follow at times because the story changed both time and place when going from chapter to chapter.
That is my only criticism of this beautifully written memoir. ( )

I enjoyed Andrew Pham's first book, Catfish and Mandala, so I looked forward to reading his latest, the story of his father's life in Vietnam from the Japaneese occupation during World War II through the withdrawal of American forces in 1975.

This book did not disappoint. Thong Van Pham, the author's father, is the son of a wealthy landowning family in North Vietnam. Chapters alternate between Thong's life as a child and early adolescent in northern Vietnam and his experiences as a young adult after his family flees to the southern part of the country.

What I think the author (and his father) do especially well is depict the web of personal relationships between Pham's family, friends, and the farmers working their land, and the inevitability of the conflicts that arise between people who all want independence for their country, but don't agree on how to achieve this goal.

The book is beautifully written, and was helpful to me in putting the "Vietnam war" as we call it in the US, into a larger context of Vietnamese history.

The Eves of Heaven is an "auto-biography" by Thong Van Pham. In fact it is written by his son Andrew, but he takes on the first person voice of his father Thong, similar to the technique used by Dave Eggers in What Is the What?. It is difficult to know how accurate it is, or what degree of artistic license is involved, but in a way it doesn't matter because as creative non-fiction it reads like a novel.

Not only is the story highly engrossing, thrilling and fascinating, but it is humane. Thong never seems to loose his sense of dignity and respect for life despite the horrors of violence, drugs and prostitution that stalk him. The lush prose is deliciously sensuous in one chapter, then shifts to scenes of deprivation the next, like a master chef playing the pallet between extremes of texture and temperature - and like the fusion of French and Asian culture that is Vietnam.

The Eaves of Heaven covers over 30 years of war in Vietnam as it transitioned from a "feudal" age to the modern world in one or two generations - the Japanese in WWII, the French and then the Americans. One mans lifetime saw it all from start to end. Through this wonderfully written, humane and moving memoir of a single life, the reader is able to more fully understand the Vietnam experience as a whole.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )