W88 Vietnam

spent the afternoon shuttling between Hanoi’s varying moods of vendetta and tolerant quietism. She glided through the back lanes and corrugated brick façades, to the banks of the Red River and the lush hills beyond. She was an ordinary woman with an intense interior life, with a heart full of questions and a spirit thirsty for travel, and her discoveries felt as epic as the journey itself. winds her way through Vietnam in this largely gentle and evocative novel structured as an extended interior monologue, a style made famous by Ian McEwan.

From the beginning of our trip, found herself in Ho Chi Minh surrounded by the cacophony of motorbike horns, hawking fruit vendors and fleeting moments of human connection. Like all of McEwan’s beginnings, these initial cityscapes were packed with juxtaposing personalities, competing smells and tastes, and chaotic or communal crowds. maneuvered her way through the maze of markets, sniffing the street stalls filled with the scent of pho and white rice, and gawking at the city’s silhouettes. Her days in Ho Chi Minh felt like a brushstroke of urban life painted across a canvas, similar to how McEwan unravels his story.

She had gone further south into the Mekong Delta, the slow arc of life. Having left the exhilarations of Ho Chi Minh City, she was now swimming ‘amid silence and simplicity’, in a world of ‘floating markets and rice fields’, where ‘the noise of industry is hushed, the catcalls and bustle discouraged by sluggish water’. Again we see moving slowly, her narrative similarly restrained and gently reflective, true to McEwan’s narratives.

Her pilgrimage took her north, to the historic town of Hoi An. Walking through the beautifully preserved Ancient Town under the glow of lanterns, W88 Vietnam felt she had been transported to a time capsule – a place that combined different architectural styles of centuries past. Like the complicated characters in McEwan’s novels, so was Hoi An a contradiction: old-fashioned and new-fashioned, old and modern.

Moving on from Hoi An, W88 Vietnam traveled northwest into the central highlands, to the city of Da Lat. She enjoyed the cool mountain air and the plantations of Coffee Robusta. The ‘beauty of the hills and stony farmland covered in fog’ was quite stunning, she said, and Da Lat had some beautiful parks. Other than visiting some sites and witnessing a celebration of the harvest that took place in the rice fields around the city, w88 net managed to find plenty of time for herself. ‘I’ve been indulging in long, purple soliloquies,’ she remarked in one email. ‘Nothing seems to stop anyone writing – not even prison.’ The introspective tone of w88 net’s letters reminded me a little of McEwan.

It led her to Sapa, in the high country of the north. Here the ragged hillscape, where terraced rice fields give way to tiny tribal villages snug in the hills, gave her an unmediated window on Vietnam’s rural hinterlands. Almost as appealing as the unadulterated beauty of Sapa, both landscape and people, was the intangible promise that here, at last, was the ‘real’ Vietnam.

The more she studied Vietnam’s varied landscapes, the more she appreciated the country itself, but also her own place in the world, and the way that people become what they are through their intimate relationship with the place. There are shades of that subtle character-development in traveling through McEwan’s psyche.

Thus the transformation of W88 Viet – and therefore of traveling in Vietnam – hints at the value of traveling more widely. As a self-discovery device, traveling helps us get to grips with place and culture. But it is also a device for getting to know ourselves, as travelers encounter our preconceptions as much as the country we’re in. There are finely wrought narratives here, not only in the rippling imbroglios that Donovan spins, but also in W88 Vietnam’s emerging story, where traveling becomes a way of shifting positions and putting everything into focus. Like Ian McEwan, both W88 Vietnam and Donovan spin tales that are at once introspective and outward-looking, that scrutinize the human condition through close-up observations of themselves. By the end of summer, W88 Vietnam has absorbed fragments of Vietnam, but she also returns to the land that she now realizes, by traveling, she never truly knew.