From the Other Side — Patrick Autréaux
now via 3AM Magazine
“I only met him once. Vietnam had just started to reopen. Knowing of my interest in the literature of their country, friends had taken advantage of my presence to gather a couple of writers. Several generations had come together in a little apartment. He, Bao Ninh, was introduced to me as a the author of a novel whose publication had caused a stir at the end of the eighties, and had been banned since. That afternoon, he said almost nothing. He listened to the others. He stayed quiet in front of the present-day dissidents, those, at least, who had dared to come.
I never suspected that his book would find me much, much later. Nor that he would become one of the veins of my relationship with that country …”
*
My translation of Patrick Autréaux’s ‘From the Other Side — On The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh’ is now up at 3AM Magazine.
Click here to read.
*
Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Survive; Verdier, 2013). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux (The Husband) will be published by Gallimard in Spring 2025. Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English as In The Valley of Tears published by UIT Books, and his essays have appeared in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 9), Asymptote, and elsewhere. Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier, 2021), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated to Spanish and published by Canta Mares.