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Soul brother: Author Wayne Karlin. — File Photo |
HA NOI — The Vietnamese translation of Wayne Karlin's Wandering Souls, a novel about the American War in Viet Nam, has hit bookstores throughout the nation.
Wandering Souls tells a story of an American veteran, First Lt Homer Steedly, who on March 19, 1969, came face-to-face with and shot a young North Vietnamese medic named Hoang Ngoc Dam.
In the dead man's pockets, Steedly found a notebook filled with beautiful line drawings. Thirty-five years later, Steedly opens the book and discovered the drawings of the man who had wanted to become a healer.
He makes a vow to return the book to the dead man's family and seek their forgiveness, hoping to find some release from the war that has defined his life.
With eloquence and understanding, Karlin, an award-winning author and himself a veteran, reveals the startling similarities between the parallel lives of Steedly and Dam, recounting Steedly's years of trauma and a slow recovery that could only come about through confrontation with the ghosts of his past – and the need of Dam's family to bring their brother's "wandering soul" to peace.
The book was published in the US last September and the Vietnam News Agency Publishing House obtained the rights to publish a Vietnamese translation.
Karlin has written various books on the war in Viet Nam, including Lost Armies, The Wished-for Country, Rumor and Stones, Prisoners and Marble Mountain. He is also contributor and co-editor, with Le Minh Khue and Trong Vu, to The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers.
Karlin received the Paterson Prize in Fiction in 1998 and an Excellence in the Arts Award from the Viet Nam Veterans of America in 2005. He lives in Maryland, where he teaches at the College of Southern Maryland. — VNS