Purple Days

Mark Ford

  • The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
    Faber, 230 pp, £14.99, March 1994, ISBN 0 571 17134 6
  • The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos
    Secker, 217 pp, £8.99, January 1994, ISBN 0 436 31042 2
  • A Good Scent from Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
    Minerva, 249 pp, £5.99, November 1993, ISBN 0 7493 9767 5
  • Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation by David Wyatt
    Cambridge, 230 pp, £35.00, February 1994, ISBN 0 521 44151 X

George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from recent years of the Vietnam War’s continuing hold on the American imagination. One could just about suspend disbelief when Sylvester Stallone set about rewriting history, but it was disconcerting to find the President of the United States so clearly in the grip of the same fantasy of revenge.

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