Dragon Hunt

The Vietnam Tran Vu portrays in the five unapologetically frank stories of this collection (his first to be translated into English) is a desperate, deeply troubled place. Himself an emigrant, Tran Vu puts his characters through trials as harrowing as his have been. Each of the five stories taps a different portion of the emigrant experience, from exile in France to the return to war-torn cities. In ""The Coral Reef"" hundreds of Chinese-Vietnamese escaping the failed socialism of the postwar era are shipwrecked and struggle to survive, endangered by dwindling water supplies and circling sharks. Elder Sister, the narrator of ""Gunboat on the Yangtze,"" endures her scarred brother's frantic attempts to connect to life through rape and a sexual relationship. The title story is a harrowing fable of postwar Vietnam combining lyrical prose and gory images to create a surreal emotional landscape. The spareness of Tran Vu's prose, which McPherson and Duong translate ably, tends to give short shrift to narrative tension. The complexities of Vietnamese society--the rivalries between the North and South, ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese, the haves and the have-nots--are, however, handled with sensitivity and insight by the tough survivalist characters. (Mar.) FYI: An adaptation of ""The Coral Reef"" first appeared in Granta.