Writer of business novels

TP - For a long time, the topic of business in Vietnamese novels has been absent. That is because in creativity, no matter how much imagination and knowledge the writer has, he still needs to experience reality to get the abundant materials of life. The business world is not a field of material that can be completed after just a few times of practice, but one needs to eat, sleep, and breathe with it.

Writer Pham Thi Bich Thuy is lucky to have worked for many international organizations and multinational corporations for more than 20 years. After the short story collection “Runaway” and two novels “Flying Sand Dunes” and “Lost Flute”, she made her mark with the novel “Down the Well” released in 2015. This is perhaps the first novel to outline the operation of a business from the subsidy period to the market mechanism, through which we can visualize the overall picture of the Vietnamese economy throughout the process of mechanism transition. Pham Thi Bich Thuy has a knack for creating typical characters, something that any writer must face if they want their work to leave a lasting impression on readers. More than that, the female author is skilled at caricature characters not only through descriptions but mainly through dialogue.

Writer Pham Thi Bich Thuy

Pham Thi Bich Thuy's novels are dense with dialogue. And through just one dialogue, the character's portrait gradually emerges, like an illusion that gradually becomes so clear that it seems to be sitting right next to us, as grumpy as Thuong (in Gia dinh co bo chi em gai), as hateful as Hach (in Day gieng). The dialogue is genuine, attractive and suspenseful, that is how the writer has handled the work in a unique and different way.

If in “The Bottom of the Well”, the picture of Vietnamese commerce goes back half a century and stands in the middle of a transition period, then in “The Family with Four Sisters”, a large-format novel of more than 600 pages released by the author in the fall of 2024, the realistic details revolve around the different corporate culture between a modern state-owned company and a foreign company. In the previous novel, the author described the culture of “eating on the wing”, working in teams, and group interests that crushed the development of businesses in particular and the Vietnamese economy in general, then in this newly published work, the mindset of “family rule” and “first relationships, second money, third descendants, fourth intelligence” has turned the management team into a termite nest that destroys the organization from within. From Vokado of “The Bottom of the Well” to “Vitalex” of “Family with Four Sisters”, all make people feel indignant, heartbroken, and even scared for the future of the next generation.

Pham Thi Bich Thuy won the Second Prize in the 2016-2017 Short Story Writing Contest (no First Prize) organized by the Le Luu Writers Foundation. She is a member of the Vietnam Writers Association. Through the two novels mentioned above, Pham Thi Bich Thuy proves that she is not an amateur, that literature is not a game but a passion, a concern, and a concern.

After releasing the collection of short stories “Zero” (2017), Pham Thi Bich Thuy made her followers think that she had run out of capital and that nothing could surpass “Dận ở sống” (The Bottom of the Well). But no, 9 years after releasing “Đận ở sống”, her fourth novel even surpassed the achievements of many years ago. “Gia đình có tứ chi em gái” (Four Sisters Family) is an engaging novel from the first chapter to the last. This time, the work is not only about the business world and the negative aspects of society but also about family. “Tứ nữ bất bân” (Four Women Are Not Poor) is a common concept among Vietnamese people, but the four women in Pham Thi Bich Thuy’s work is a “dramatic” twist when from a peaceful childhood raised in the cradle of teacher Binh, the adult life of the whole extended family suddenly turns into a chaos that is always boiling like a pressure cooker. The typical character is Thuong, the eldest sister who was hard-working and sacrificed for everyone since childhood, but later suddenly became stingy, calculating, jealous, greedy, and short-sighted. She is like a psychologically ill remnant from the subsidy period.

Pham Thi Bich Thuy is very good at building psychological logic and situational logic. What at first sounds absurd, each page of the book shows that it is very reasonable. The second sister is Ai, a proud, wise and opportunistic person who refused to help Thuong because of Thuong's arrogant and jealous attitude combined with the laziness, negligence and deceitfulness of Thuong's two children, Hung Thuan and Hung Duc. Meanwhile, the main character is An, the third sister who tried to help Hung Thuan but failed, is a rare character in both literature and real life. That is because she is an intelligent, upright and honest person, determined to be a lotus in the mud no matter what pressure, both in society and in the family. The story ends dramatically but tragically. Ai's husband was poisoned, a sudden death as a result of social boils that had to burst. The inequality of employment opportunities due to the preferential treatment of children and grandchildren combined with the bad habits of Vietnamese people have perhaps turned the little girl Thuong from a loving, patient child into a monstrous cell of society. It is not too much to say that “The Family with Four Sisters” is a book about the bad habits of Vietnamese people through fictional language. Critic Nguyen Hoai Nam said that “The Family with Four Sisters” is a novel in which the author has gone beyond concern for personal fate, to place himself in concern for the fate of the community and civil society in its continuous development. Veteran writer Ma Van Khang commented, “The work has some truly touching pages. For example, the chapter describing the death anniversary of the father of the four sisters. Honestly, his image reminds me of the figure of poet and teacher Pham Cuc (the author's father) whom I had the honor of knowing during my lifetime. In my opinion, The Family of Four Sisters is a good, attractive novel, with the weight of thoughts, emotions and intelligence, written with a passion that is both passionate and profound. Obviously, the process of generating ideas, forming images, creating layers, structures, and languages ​​is a passionate and restless ecstasy". Many people feel that the novel is like an autobiography of the author because of its authenticity. However, the writer's ability always makes fiction come alive to the point of being real. It is undeniable that the works always take advantage of the multi-dimensional living resources of the writer when Pham Thi Bich Thuy (1964) has a rather dramatic background and experience. She is a BA in literature and Russian, and was an international student at Ghersen Leningrad University (Saint Petursburg), Russian Federation. While teaching Russian literature at the University of Foreign Languages ​​(Vietnam National University, Hanoi) from 1986-2000, she continued to study English and completed her bachelor's degree with an innate sense of the times. After that, she finished teaching, left the payroll, struggled to work "outside" in the private sector, and then completed her master's degree in business administration to do business, working in many organizations from the state, private to multinational corporations. Currently, she works as an administrator at a Startup Support organization.

Di Li

Tienphong.vn

Source: https://tienphong.vn/nha-van-cua-nhung-tieu-thuyet-ve-thuong-truong-post1680793.tpo