For a decade during the "American War," North Vietnamese author and singer Duong Thu Huong was one of 30 people recruited for an artistic troupe that performed for soldiers near the central border, where much of the heaviest bombing took place. When the war ended, she was among the three who survived, and her subsequent career as a novelist met with enormous success. But Huong's persistent criticism of the prevailing Communist regime eventually landed her in prison without trial for seven months, and her books have been banned in Vietnam ever since. Her latest novel, the lyrical and quietly acerbic Memories Of A Pure Spring, cloaks these autobiographical details in a thin fictional veil, emerging with a perspective on the war and its aftermath that flip-flops expectations. In Huong's mind, the relentless bombing of American planes was not nearly as treacherous as postwar bureaucracy; the real dread for her sinks in right after the victory celebration. The book's defining image—an ecstatic Party leader cresting a hill, like a conquering hero, in an American jeep—speaks volumes about the post-Liberation government, which hypocritically embraces the petty materialism it purports to deride. Jumping back and forth in time, at points both during and after the war, Huong centers on the tragic marriage of Suong, a singer for a troupe in central Vietnam, and Hung, its chief composer and leader. Plucked from a mountain community at age 16, Suong is drawn into a passionate romance with Hung, a man 10 years her elder, but their relationship is wrenched apart during peacetime by forces beyond their control. The present-day passages find her in a hospital recovering from a suicide attempt, while her husband, arbitrarily dismissed from the Cultural Service, has become a raging drunk. Narrated in hot-blooded, richly sensual language that's evocative at times, overwrought in others, Memories Of A Pure Spring mourns the decay of a powerful union that's co-opted and diminished by the state. Huong's rapid transitions through time are disorienting, but as she weighs the past with the present, her prose develops a bittersweet, melancholic pull that's deeply personal and undeniably seductive.