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Linda Le. Les trois Parques. Paris. Christian Bourgois. 1997. 246 pages. 120 F. ISBN 2-267-01427-0.
Les trois Parques is the latest work by Linda Le, a prolific refugee writer from Vietnam (see WLT 63:2, p. 369, and 71:3, p. 657). The three Parcae (or Fates of Roman mythology) are three unnamed Saigon-born young women, two sisters and their cousin settled in France through their grandmother's arrangement when the communists swept down from North Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Each of them survived in the new environment in her own way, living in her own cocoonlike world, untouched by mainstream French culture. As indicated in the postface, this iconoclastic book was written "in great isolation," "in pain," and "to the limit of the bearable" following the death of the author's father in Vietnam. Le describes the three main characters as...