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Annam

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Annam

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Overview

C'est pour le Viêt-nam du XVIII^esiècle que s'embarquent une poignée de religieux français. Femmes et hommes de cœur, ils ont choisi l'inconnu. Ils mettront plus d'un an pour arriver à Saigon.
Là-bas, ils enseignent les Évangiles aux paysans du Sud.
Puis la France connaît la Révolution. Elle oublie ses missionnaires du Levant.
Ceux-ci ont tout quitté, puis tout réappris. Le Viêt-nam, par sa moiteur, par sa beauté, les changés. Ils y vivent, ils y meurent, ils ont oublié Dieu.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782246810858
Publisher:	Grasset
Publication date:	09/04/2013
Series:	Littérature Française
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	134 KB
Language:	French

About the Author

Christophe Bataille est éditeur et romancier. On lui doit en particulier Quartier général du bruit, Le rêve de Machiavel, L’expérience, La brûlure, tous publiés chez Grasset. Il a écrit avec Rithy Panh L’élimination et La paix avec les morts (janvier 2020), prix Marguerite Duras et prix de l’essai des Ecrivains du Sud.

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Editorial Reviews

Winner of France's Prix du Premier Roman in 1993 for its then 21-year-old author, this short first novel is a parable about the hubris of colonialism and the power of place. In 1787, Canh, the seven-year-old emperor of Vietnam, visits the French court of Louis XVI, beseeching France to send troops and missionaries to his troubled land. Canh dies of pneumonia, his offer rejected by the soon-to-be-beheaded king. But one year later, two French ships crammed with Dominican monks and nuns, as well as soldiers, make the perilous journey to Vietnam. The expedition's goal is to help Vietnamese Prince Regent Nguyen Anh, exiled in Siam, recover his throne. The missionaries start a religious community, build dikes and rafts, teach French and evangelize. Meanwhile, France suffers the paroxysm of its revolution. In 1800, Nguyen Anh, having seized powerand embittered because the French colonists have abandoned himlaunches a massacre of the Dominican missionaries. Only two survive, Sister Catherine and Brother Dominic. As they mesh with the villagers, their religious convictions erode and they eventually become lovers. In Howard's superb translation, Bataille's style, built around short sentences, achieves a cumulative lyricism that poignantly captures the unfulfilled promise and tragedy of a historic moment that preceded the French conquest of Saigon by more than half a century. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Forsaken by their French government in the throes of revolution, a small band of Dominican monks and nuns on a conversion mission organized by the beneficent aristocrat Pierre Pigneau de Brhaine sets off for the mythical land of Vietnam. In the hands of Bataille, who won the French Prix du Premier Roman for this beautifully spare tale in 1993, the voyage and subsequent establishment of a mission in Ba Dien is fraught with momentousness in every detail: the strange and unsettling weather, sickness, food, and customs. Although the missionaries are loved because they try to understand the natives and fashion lives of hard work and virtue, they arouse the ire of the emperor's military, who brutally massacre all but Brother Dominic and Sister Catherine, who have moved on to Annam. There, with the unending rains and passing of eventless days, their faith slowly erodes until they are left only with the love for each other. The exquisite simplicity of Bataille's prose perfectly mirrors the quiet dignity of these souls. His allegory of the murderous folly of colonialism will be a luxury puchase for most libraries, however.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Annam ( Sept. 30, 1996; 112 pp.; 0-8112-1330-7): This skillfully understated first novel describes in muted though harrowing detail the ordeal undergone by an expedition of French clergy sent as missionaries to Vietnam during the late-18th-century reign of Louis XVI. Orphaned by the Revolution (in effect, forgotten by their country), the uprooted monks and nuns experience both the failure of their mission and a rigorous testing of their faith. This subtle and moving roman (here beautifully translated by Richard Howard) won France's Prix du Premier Roman in 1993, when the author was 21.

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