The Zenith - by Duong Thu Huong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Memory is the one who builds you a permanent court of justice. Memory is the one at your side from whom you cannot run...

A sweeping tale of thwarted love, political intrigue, and the price of power--"The Doctor Zhivago of Vietnam" (Boston Globe)--about Ho Chi Minh, the founding father of modern Vietnam, a man beloved by millions but shrouded in controversy and mystery

Vietnam's most popular dissident writer, Duong Thu Huong has won acclaim for her exceptional lyricism and psychological acumen, as well as for her unflinching portraits of modern Vietnam and its culture and people. Built on 15 years of research, The Zenith imagines the final months in the life of Ho Chi Minh--president of North Vietnam from 1945 until his death in 1969--at an isolated mountain compound where he is imprisoned both physically and emotionally.

Complex, daring, and elegiac, Huong's novel weaves Ho Chi Minh's story together with narratives of members of his inner circle and a village elder, illuminating the personal costs of political struggle, the addictive quality of power and influence, and how a tragedy can threaten to engulf not just one individual but an entire nation. Most radically, it is a multidimensional portrait of Ho Chi Minh himself; a man who is often painted as a saint, martyr, or puppet, but whom Huong portrays as a real person whose life encapsulated humanity's capacity for vision, greed, pain, love, and fallibility.

An epic masterpiece that is both a gripping political thriller and a haunting excavation of the human heart, The Zenith is an unforgettable novel that leaves readers unsettled, transformed, and closer to life's fundamental mysteries.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Zenith

"[The Zenith] bravely imagines the final months of Ho Chi Minh's life. It is the Doctor Zhivago of Vietnam, a book that explodes the sacred pieties of a Communist revolution by looking at the cost that revolution exacted on individual lives and romances . . . A vast and moving story about a nation liberated from colonialism only to be bound to an inhuman ideology, one that stripped even its heralded leader of his flesh and blood . . . a book that looks down on the Communist experiment from a lofty height and attempts to return it to a human scale. Remarkably, it succeeds, especially in its portrait of the country's leader." --The Boston Globe

"In this wonderful novel, Duong Thu Huong fearlessly confronts the merciless regime, describing the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War. Through a few families and their intimate stories, she merges political tragedy with human tragedies." --Elle

"The Zenith, lyrically translated by husband-wife translators Stephen B. Young and Hoa Pham Young, is part modern Vietnamese fable, part tragedy . . . the idea of power clashing with conscience forms the core of the novel." --The Toronto Star

"[Huong] turns her penetrating gaze toward the highest, most venerated seat of power in Communist Vietnam: the revolution's architect and saint, Ho Chi Minh . . . Huong [is] a master detective or the gutsiest of fiction writers." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Told from multiple points of view via characters whose lives unwittingly intersect . . . A fluid, nuanced, and densely intricate look at a culture still relatively unknown to Western readers, Huong's challenging novel offers rich detail and provocative insights." --Booklist

"Huong's lyrical narrative, developed at a deliberate pace, is sometimes reminiscent of Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil . . . it also has undertones of Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat . . . a complex, politically daring story, much of which will be unfamiliar to Western readers--and that demands to be read for that very reason." --Kirkus Reviews

"The Zenith is worth the time and attention, every page revealing richer, deeper treasures, poetic and moving, a grand yet intimate canvas of history, ideology, love affairs, and tragic beauty -- most of all beauty, of the country, of the women, and of the heart." --Historical Novel Society

"Huong is an imposing figure in Vietnamese literature . . . Much as Hilary Mantel in her Cromwell books, Huong makes the historical personal . . . one has the sense of a Tolstoyesque breadth and depth of both landscape and character . . . The Zenith represents a tour de force from an important writer taking great risks, political and literary. Beginning with a bold initial premise, Huong follows through with an epic on an impressive scale that does that premise justice." --Fiction Writers Review

"This is an important book that blends passion, clarity, a great understanding of the human heart, and a keen desire to pay tribute to those lost to history." --Le Monde

Praise for the work of Duong Thu Huong:

"Extraordinary and profoundly tragic." --Boston Sunday Globe

"Astonishingly powerful." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Breathtakingly original." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Duong Thu Huong is an award-winning Vietnamese novelist and activist living in exile in Paris. Her novels include Paradise of the Blind, No Man's Land, Memories of a Pure Spring, and Novel Without a Name.