Vietnamese self-publishing project

Summary

Through commitment, emotion and passion, this ambitious collective project aims to promote cultural exchange across the world, in particular through the art and culture of Vietnam; it is conceived out of a concern for authenticity and innovation, and a demand for high quality. It also unveils a patented multimedia information system created for artistic, cultural, educational and entertainment purposes. It opens up a whole new concept of what a book can be, based on a fusion of text and sound via the intermediary of the image. The zixbook trademark and the Internet domain name, zixbook.com, have been registered for protecting this innovative book. The website http://www.zixbook.com has also been set up for raising funds at international level.

Description

The existing draft copy is the first art form of the zixbook called zixnov. It combines a documentary-type novel with photographs and a DVD. Thanks to its specific layout, it has become an original graphic novel.

The first volume is a hybrid novel, zixnov.1, entitled Vietnam, the Legend of Lost Love, intricately entwining reality and fiction in the form of a road journal that mixes journalistic narrative, photojournalism, a love story, legend, ethnographical writing, espionage and poetry. It tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant living in Paris who returns to the land of his birth. There, he discovers the harsh realities of everyday life, the poverty of the ethnic minorities, disillusionment and love. In particular, the book focuses on the human condition, the absurdity of life, a deep-rooted attachment to one’s native country intensified by exile, the impossibility of forgetting the past and the vital importance of preserving the different cultures that make up a multi-ethnic State.

230 black and white photographs were taken in 2000, more particularly in the mountains of the extreme north of Vietnam. These pictures form the basis of a committed reportage which focuses on scenes of everyday life of ordinary people, as seen through the eyes of a non-Westerner. The soundtrack of the slide show on the DVD incorporated into the book includes six stunning tracks which are recent hits in Vietnam together with the bonus audio version of the Vietnamese text.

The second volume, zixnov.2, entitled Vietnam, Karmical Saudades, is a sequel to the first. More fictional and with color photographs, it continues on from the first volume, adding other modes of writing such as scientific, fantasty and detective storytellings.

Based on the same concept and the same story, an alternative art form of the zixbook, called zixtoon (trilingual graphic novel with related DVD) is being planned to complete the zixnov. The zixtoon will include a series of several comic strip volumes.

Progress

Draft zixnov.1 with black & white photographs nearly completed;

* awaiting foreword to be written and Vietnamese narration to be recorded

Draft zixnov.2 with color photographs in progress;

Draft zixtoon series started with vol.1.

Currently approaching sponsors and patrons worldwide for funding, to get the project officially approved in Vietnam, the music copyright settled, the Vietnamese text recorded, the art books printed and the DVDs mastered. Appropriate means of diffusion via Internet are being studied for the world market.

Forecast budget: US$ 100,000 for a first run in three languages (English, French and Vietnamese)

Paris, Jan.1, 2006

Bùi Huy Trang

Introduction by Nguyên Huy Thiêp

Khau Vai - the Legend of Lost Love is a story narrated by a Vietnamese man who lives in Paris and decides to share his story with us through text, image and also sound. For a number of reasons, this remarkable work has perturbed me and given me food for thought. As a writer myself, I can understand the strange impulses that force an ordinary man put pen to paper and start to write. And how, from that moment on, unlike anything he has known before, these forces become a source of anxiety for the writer and for other people. The author left Vietnam when a young boy; he grew up in France, where he still lives and works. His memories of Vietnam were rather vague. Then one day, returning to the land of his birth, a quite different world appeared before him. This new vision revealed an inner world which, in France, had lain dormant within him, or that he had suppressed deep in his subconscious. And this is how his vocation as artist emerged. In this life, there are some books that have changed, and even shattered the lives of their authors. There they are, quietly living their ordinary lives, among other people and with no apparent reason, when one day, they start writing a book. Such a book can be incredibly devastating: thus, its author may well risk losing everything, or find that something which he never expected, and certainly never wanted, happens. All the same, whether the work brings good or bad fortune, only the writer, and Heaven, can tell.

Khau Vai - the Legend of Lost Love tells the story of a return to the past, to the homeland, to the origins of a rootless Vietnamese man, living in a foreign country. For me, it was a real pleasure to read this narrative, and I find it hard to conceal my envious admiration. I have lived my entire life on Vietnamese soil, I am familiar with the mountainous regions in the northwest. And yet I had never heard of Khau Vai and the market where lost lovers meet, nor of the myths and customs related to this place of legend. This book held many surprises for me. I hope that you too, readers all over the world who have a place in your hearts for Vietnam, will find the zixbook full of pleasant astonishments. I would like to wish the author of this extraordinary book, Bùi Huy Trang,, good fortune as he embarks upon his new, adventurous wandering.

Hanoi, June 11, 2004

Nguyên Huy Thiêp

Vietnamese writer*

* Several of Nguyên Huy Thiêp's collections of short stories have been translated and published by Curbstone Press and Oxford University Press.

Afterword by Philippe Ortel

When Bùi Huy Trang called me one evening to ask me to write a short afterword, little did I expect to discover quite such an accomplished artist. This is his first major work, and yet he demonstrates remarkable skill in photography and in the art of storytelling. "I'm not a writer," he insisted, aware that I teach Literature. However, from the first few pages I completely forgot his warning, drawn in by the incredible sense of empathy built up between the artist and his environment in both text and images. As the story unfolds, every detail finds an echo in the inner world of the main character. As for the images, they are striking for the spontaneity in the people's expressions and attitudes, the immediacy of the scenes captured in the street or countryside - all pointing to the extraordinary complicity connecting the artist and his subject. Indeed, such a close rapport is possibly the very essence of the artist's style, a guarantee that what we are shown has first been filtered through a unique sensibility. Of course, we know that such things cannot be taught, which is why it is always disconcerting to discover a true artist in an author who has absolutely no training or background in the arts.

In the course of our conversations, Bùi Huy Trang told me that a number of people had expressed interest in his photographs, particularly certain writers, photographers and researchers that he had contacted and who specialize in Vietnam. This interest is partly based on the detail of observation manifested in the photographs, together with the commentary that is slipped into the text. The positions of the people in the photographs, the distance between them, the look in their eyes – none of this is the result of pure chance but, rather, seems deliberately designed to draw us deeper into the culture of Vietnam. Only an artist born in the country could really manage to capture such fleeting glimpses of reality without, as is all too often the case, cloaking them in an aesthetics that is not one's own. It is also true to say that the work gains value as an ethnographic study in light of the emotional context in which it has been given form.

From the very first chapter, Bùi Huy Trang writes of the difficulty of living far from the land of one's birth. His hero feels a desire to get back in touch with his country and also with his language which he hardly speaks at all after so many years immersed in French culture and language. While the hero is not the author, it is clear that the latter is not seeking to represent Vietnam so much as to actually re-find it. Hence, the highest level of objectivity here merges with the deepest sense of empathy. The text goes on to evoke the sense of guilt felt by the exile who knows that he is safe while his country is at war. In this context, the precise information and the scrupulous attention to detail seems like a promise of fidelity made to the land he has left behind. The moral aspects of the undertaking become more evident if we look at the fiction: "Having experienced war at such a tender age […] had made him all too conscious of how precious life really is," we read of the hero. The irreversible separation produced by death, which goes even deeper than the exile's sense of being wrenched from his homeland, turns life itself into a land that needs to be saved. By celebrating existence in all its forms, the work attempts to show the value of things, regardless of cultural differences.

To bring Vietnam, or rather, his Vietnam, to life, Bùi Huy Trang found the traditional form of the book too restrictive. His admiration for Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, the first French novel illustrated with photographs (published in 1892), inspired him to invent a new kind of publication in which DVD would play a major role. He soon thought of a name for this multimedia work -the Zixbook. Composite, like the object that it describes, the Zixbook is made up of the phonemes in music, computer pixels and "book". From this unusual combination of sounds there emanates a certain exoticism that is perfectly in keeping with the other forms of exoticism defended by the work. One might be tempted to think that the values conveyed by western technique would be totally at odds with the traditional Vietnam it is used to evoke in this book, but that would be forgetting the fact that technical ingeniosity is also a typical characteristic of Vietnamese culture. This becomes evident when we think of the number of man-made objects mentioned in the text - the tools, toys, machines and craft products that the hero sees on his journey. All these objects reflect back to the photographer, or rather the inventor, an image of his own skill. Thus, far from being a travesty of and betraying the author's cultural origins, developing the Zixbook has, on the contrary, brought him more closely in touch with them.

Through the fusion of text, image and the page on the screen, the multimedia work cannot but transform the way in which we read. The book’s originality lies, most apparently, in its very weight and size. The effort to decipher meaning that is typical of the conventional reading experience is replaced for the reader by an extraordinary sensory experience calling on the senses of touch and sight as well as sound, since the slideshow on the DVD also includes a musical soundtrack. The Zixbook also engages our entire body since the need to turn from book to screen presupposes a minimum amount of movement and effort. Of course, it may be argued that every reading experience engages the senses, however, Western education generally relegates such actual physical contact as this to second place, focusing primarily on the intellectual effort of deciphering the text. On the other hand, when illustration conflicts with a text, the surface of the image renders the surface of the page visible, the graphics or photographic design makes us look again at the very type of the printed word and the shifting movement of looking from image to text or from text to image makes the reader aware of his or her own body thanks to the slightest effort required. Here too, the Zixbook recalls the experience of travel because when we visit a country for the first time, we generally become caught up in a universe of heightened senses of sounds, smells and colors. It is only later that we become aware of the meaning of what we have seen.

The Zixbook is also a space in which the "reader" travels. Because of the format, particularly, the novel relates a journey, yet at the same time, it is a space in which we can travel - both the representation of the journey and a territory to be traveled through. It opens up a number of different paths for us, each medium serving as a vehicle or a road that takes us to the journey's mythical destination, the legendary market of lost love, hidden away in the remote mountains of Ha Giang. So, we can choose our means of transport: we can take the narrative, and forget the pictures (and in that case, we can also choose between English, Vietnamese or French - three quite different routes). Or we can leaf through the work as one might leaf through a photo album, without looking at the text. Or we can jump from text to image, sensing that the gap between the two draws closer and closer as the narrative progresses. Of course, these correspondences do not prevent the existence of subtle deviations that give the photographs a life of their own, independent of the text. As for the musical slideshow, this creates a feeling of retracing the journey if you have already read the book; otherwise, it serves as an invitation to the daydream that only takes shape after reading the text.

All these alternative paths make the Zixbook work like an orchestra, - an effect that can only really be produced in the mind of the reader or, rather, the "video-reader". Indeed, only the reader's memory can superimpose all these different journeys and harmonize the facts after the event. Is this not exactly what the traveler does? Is the unity that we impose on our adventures, once we have returned home, not purely retrospective? This process creates a unified impression that cannot completely cancel out the deeply multifarious nature of the journey, made up of isolated moments, surprises and the unexpected. The multimedia book, by preventing the complete fusion of text, image and sound (unlike the cinema), succeeds in retaining that heterogeneity typical of a real journey even as it constructs unity. Each medium thus offers us a different dimension of the adventure, yet without losing its own specific nature: with the wealth of information given and the explanations that it contains, the narrative focuses on the cultural and emotional side of the journey. From this point of view, the love story invented by Bùi Huy Trang, instead of blurring reality, on the contrary intensifies the empathy he feels for reality. Through the mental process of crystallization, everything that is beautiful about Vietnam is associated in the reader's mind with the charm of the heroine. As for the photographs, they highlight the visual dimension of the voyage, recreating the intense impact that places we have never seen before have on us. The less we know, the more we see, and thus, for the explorer, reality is above all visual. Finally, the music accompanying the slideshow works to interiorize the voyage, or, as Bùi Huy Trang writes, it "deepens" the experience. The sequence of images seems to play out on the stage of the mind what the narrative portrays on the stage of the world. Like memories and daydreams, the photos pass before our eyes in no particular order, certainly not in chronological order, even though they do in fact appear in the same order as in the narrative. The interiorization effect is thus even more intense since the DVD invites us to live or relive the voyage in an alternative space and time than that of reading. Switching from the book to the screen produces a projection that is very similar to that which separates the dream from reality or the memory from the actual past experience.

At the end of the story, Bùi Huy Trang writes that the intensity of the memory adds an amazing dimension to the real experience: "it was the vividness of his memories that produced this vertiginous Alice in Wonderland-type perception". When mental images within the memory become impregnated with emotion, the gap between memory and the imagination narrows because our daydreams are always the translation of our fears and desires into images. The same can be said when we associate photography and music, as in the slideshow. Because of their sentimental nature, the nostalgic and often tragic songs by the renowned composer Lê Minh Son and the talented singers Pham Ngoc Khuê and Nguyên Tung Duong heighten our propensity to dream, thus lending the journey the status of legend. The daydream state that dominates the text is intensified by the very fact of producing a series of images in succession, because it subjects every shot to a rhythm similar to that of the music. Vanishing a few seconds after they appear, the images rapidly lose their anchoring in space and time, limiting our view to a purely visual scansion, an abstract rhythm of tones and forms that allows them to reach into the very depths of our imaginations. After a few minutes, it is as if we see less of the actual content of the photographs and more of a contrasting succession of wide-angled shots and close-ups, of open and closed places, of full and empty spaces, of moving or static subjects, of clear or blurred shots. The graphical or visual rhythm effects us deeply because it simulates and stimulates our psyche which also alternates between intense and insignificant experience, between tension and repose.

Finally, the use of music proves that Bùi Huy Trang has not only created a multimedia work but also a collective work, one that is able to make several voices heard, possibly because the essential ingredients of the journey are the encounter and dialogue. This is why, although I know nothing about life in Vietnam, it has been a pleasure and an honor for me to add these comments to this remarkable work of art. I would like to wish it good luck and every success as it sets out on this ultimate voyage, during which, I am sure, it will travel down the most unexpected paths.

Toulouse, Feb.10, 2004

Philippe Ortel

Head of Modern Literature Dpt. at University of Toulouse Le Mirail - France

Graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure