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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #15
Granta 15: The Fall of Saigon
Granta #15 collection of essays. Essays *On Harley-Davidson (Richard Ford); *Grandma Norman and the Queen (Philip Norman); *The Fall of Saigon (James Fenton); *Ten Years On; *Toothpaste (Frank Snepp); *Impotence (Norman Podhretz); *Dominoes (Noam Chomsky); *The Essential Writers and Responsibility (Nadine Gordimer); *A Conversation Piece (George Steiner); *On Gunter Grass (Salmon Rushdie); *THE TIN DRUM in Retrospect (Gunter Grass); *Go ask the Time (John Berger); *Warsaw Diary (Ryszard Kapuscinski); *A Life of Photographs (Don McCullin); *Revelations (Peter Grieg); and *Writing in the The first ten years (Ted Soltaroff).
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First published January 1, 1985
30 people want to read
About the author
Bill Buford
98 books322 followersWilliam Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the books Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford was previously the fiction editor for The New Yorker, where he is still on staff. For sixteen years, he was the editor of Granta, which he relaunched in 1979. He is also credited with coining the term "dirty realism".
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 14, 2016
Interesting, sometimes dated. Also fascinating to read something from the era when Poland was in crisis and made headlines.
July 22, 2019
The center piece of this edition was a superbly written, mostly honest (its sins are omissions) autobiographical essay about poet James Fentons' time as a journalistic stringer during the latter years of the Vietnam war. It's a beautifully crafted essay, filled with honest, sometimes brutal details and confused, smug, Trotskyite doubt. Fenton is an elitist Lefty, whose convictions hit a hard wall once he saw the implementation of the reeducation camps after Saigon fell. He also is a great, really great, writer. He crafts literature. This essay is in that vein, complete with evocative photos.
He hitched a ride into the first Communist tank to "crash" into the Presidential palace as the Saigon government collapsed, and he is honest enough to view that event as a metaphor for his time and perceptions of Vietnam. In reality, as he points out, the gate was too strong for the tank, the old watchman opened it and as the tank surged into the courtyard symbolically ending the war, the air was filled with dragonflies. Time reported the gate as being crushed under the tanks’ assault.
Three days later Saigon's citizens were doing everything they could to cheat and steal from the remarkably innocent but battle hardened North Vietnamese troops, just as they had the cynical Americans.
The essay gives one a real flavor of the conflict- its sordidness, Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese jokes, the corrupt culture, cynicism and humidity.
The rest of the edition is filled with other lesser essays about the sinking of the Belgrano, South Africa's Apartheid culture and Communist Poland etc..
Granta itself is one of the best literary magazines in the world and this volume stands up well even 35 years after publication. I always appreciate the care in editing and production Granta took. 35 years later the acid free paper is still as fresh as it was a third of a Century ago. It's well worth reading.
He hitched a ride into the first Communist tank to "crash" into the Presidential palace as the Saigon government collapsed, and he is honest enough to view that event as a metaphor for his time and perceptions of Vietnam. In reality, as he points out, the gate was too strong for the tank, the old watchman opened it and as the tank surged into the courtyard symbolically ending the war, the air was filled with dragonflies. Time reported the gate as being crushed under the tanks’ assault.
Three days later Saigon's citizens were doing everything they could to cheat and steal from the remarkably innocent but battle hardened North Vietnamese troops, just as they had the cynical Americans.
The essay gives one a real flavor of the conflict- its sordidness, Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese jokes, the corrupt culture, cynicism and humidity.
The rest of the edition is filled with other lesser essays about the sinking of the Belgrano, South Africa's Apartheid culture and Communist Poland etc..
Granta itself is one of the best literary magazines in the world and this volume stands up well even 35 years after publication. I always appreciate the care in editing and production Granta took. 35 years later the acid free paper is still as fresh as it was a third of a Century ago. It's well worth reading.
January 28, 2025
I read this for James Fenton on the Fall of Saigon - he is a great journalist and his report is a monument to an era of journalism that is fresh in my memory but as forgotten as the habit of 'leaving cards'.
If you want to know the Vietnam War, and more importantly, the passions it aroused you need to read Fenton. It is not simply that he wrote about what he saw, of which more in the next paragraph, but he also admits to his own disillusionment.
If you ever read a description of the Fall of Saigon and of the North Vietnamese tank crashing through the gates of the presidential palace you are reading a legend. The gates were too strong, they were there to slow down any ambitious general attempting a coup, and were unlocked by the gate keeper. James Fenton was there because he was the only Western journalist who stayed and he flagged down that tank and rode to the palace and watched the gates be unlocked. That is freelance journalism as was.
Fenton was also a politically committed journalist (he is also a poet of distinction) and I cannot help but wonder at how many outlets in today's media would carry stories by an unapologetic Trotskite? But Fenton was an honest man and though he never changed his mind about how wrong the Vietnam War was he was clear-eyed about the re-education camps and other impositions of the Communist regime'.
The days of journalism like Fenton's are gone, but then so are most of the newspapers he wrote for. Even those that still exist have changed utterly. But Granta still exists and Fenton's writing about Vietnam and elsewhere can be found in his book All the Wrong Places.
If you have never read a copy of Granta I recommend starting here. Once you start it it is hard to stop.
If you want to know the Vietnam War, and more importantly, the passions it aroused you need to read Fenton. It is not simply that he wrote about what he saw, of which more in the next paragraph, but he also admits to his own disillusionment.
If you ever read a description of the Fall of Saigon and of the North Vietnamese tank crashing through the gates of the presidential palace you are reading a legend. The gates were too strong, they were there to slow down any ambitious general attempting a coup, and were unlocked by the gate keeper. James Fenton was there because he was the only Western journalist who stayed and he flagged down that tank and rode to the palace and watched the gates be unlocked. That is freelance journalism as was.
Fenton was also a politically committed journalist (he is also a poet of distinction) and I cannot help but wonder at how many outlets in today's media would carry stories by an unapologetic Trotskite? But Fenton was an honest man and though he never changed his mind about how wrong the Vietnam War was he was clear-eyed about the re-education camps and other impositions of the Communist regime'.
The days of journalism like Fenton's are gone, but then so are most of the newspapers he wrote for. Even those that still exist have changed utterly. But Granta still exists and Fenton's writing about Vietnam and elsewhere can be found in his book All the Wrong Places.
If you have never read a copy of Granta I recommend starting here. Once you start it it is hard to stop.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews