Vietnam contemporary novels and “the Calls of Art”

Abstract

Since the 1960s, people in the world have talked about “the death” of novels and tried to find solutions to “revive” them. However, according to M. Kundera – a writer and the author of “The Art of the Novel”, if the novel goes to “the end”, it’s not necessarily that it has fully developed its abilities, knowledge, forms, but because it has missed the opportunities to hear “sensitive calls” – the calls of game, the calls of dream, the callS of thoughts and the call of time, which reminds us of interesting thinkings about the contemporary Vietnamese novels. After 1986, Vietnamese novels have made breakthroughs and had a rich harvest of novels, but the development path of the Vietnamese novels still experiences ups and downs. In this paper, we aim to learn which “calls of the art” Vietnamese novels have heard, and which calls are vague echoes. Thereby, we also hope writers will listen and come closer to those sensitive calls of novels so that Vietnamese literature would have pinnacle novels, shortening the distance from the world’s literature.