The Beauty Of 'The Beauty Of Humanity Movement'

A novel from Camilla Gibb titled "The Beauty of Humanity Movement" explores a short-lived art movement that flowered in Vietnam during the 1950s. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

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MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Vietnam has provided a rich backdrop for countless works of fiction. Those books often focus on soldiers, war and its aftermath. Well, a new novel by Camilla Gibb called "The Beauty of Humanity Movement" takes a very different approach, and reviewer Alan Cheuse thinks it's a good one.

ALAN CHEUSE: Gibb has made a loving, wise, tender, dreamy and insightful work of fiction about a loosely linked group of ordinary citizens trying to make the most in contemporary Hanoi.

Old Man Hung, the main character, is an aging survivor of the anti-French movement of the 1950s and one of the few remaining witnesses to a short-lived art movement that came after the Vietnamese victory over the French, an art movement with an aesthetic, rather than a political, bent.

Hung now rides about the sprawling, noisy, dangerous, slum-filled city on his rickety bike, setting up an illegal pho shop every day, often changing locations, selling this savory meat and vegetable soup with which everyone wants to start their morning.

His own day seems almost over, and the great love of his life well lost until the appearance of a Viet Kieu, a Vietnamese-American woman named Maggie.

Maggie is an art historian in search of traces of the work of her late father, an expatriate illustrator who returned from America after the victory over the French and joined that dissonant art movement.

A lot of recent history comes alive in this delightful novel. That's Camilla Gibb's strong suite, that she can deftly invent characters foreign to us who represent various historical turns yet make us feel their reality - their humanity is how she of course would put it, even as they go lurching or marching or, as in Old Man Hung's case, wobbling toward their destinies.

BLOCK: The book is "The Beauty of Humanity Movement" by Camilla Gibb. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His latest novel is called "Songs of Slaves in the Desert."

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/26/135745199/the-beauty-of-the-beauty-of-humanity-movement?ft=1&f=1008

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