"Those Opulent Days" by Jacquie Pham is classed as a murder mystery. The murder is a small element and colmination of the wider exploration of four friends....complex, loving, tolerant...the different faces of a long-term friendship. "One will lose his mind. One will pay. One will agonize. And one will die".
Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond have been best friends since childhood and are rich coming from the most influential families of 1928 Saigon. Well, except for the French of course, who govern Vietnam and treat the locals as second class citizens in their own country. All the more bizarre that Edmond is French and has continued his childhood friendships.
The book is narrated by the four men, their mothers, their servants, and their lovers. The cross section of perspectives reveal an intricate web of terror, loyalty, and horrific secrets.
Each friend has a distinct personality although all fragile and damaged by their upbringings. Finding solace in opium and alcohol is common. And as the fortune teller predicted, the final outcomes were dire for all.
An enjoyable read, although I lost a little momentum near the end. I was shocked by the actions of certain parties and the story telling was quite graphic in this respect but totally founded. Afterall, Saigon of this era was a violent, poor and conflicted place.
Thanks to NetGalley, Jacquie Pham and Grove Atlantic for my copy.

This book had every chance to be good, but it was just not executed well. I don’t know if it’s just because I don’t like historical fiction, but isn’t a mystery supposed to hook you? That wasn’t the case here as I had to force myself to pick this up. I must admit, it had lovely prose, and we can relate this to the current situation in Palestine. For that sole reason, I do appreciate this book.

For me, the writing of the characters was too vague or it felt like the author didn’t know the characters at all. They felt so similar to each other to the point that I wasn’t even bothered to differentiate them.

Jacquie Pham’s “Those Opulent Days,” which renders the oppression of French colonial rule of Vietnam through the lives of four young men, begins with a seer’s unsettling prophecy about the four. One will die, one will lose his mind, one will pay and one will agonize, the men are told, with the exact circumstances of the foretold death, the nature of which goes through a couple of tellings, making for the central mystery of a novel awash in instances of colonial cruelty, including horrific abuse of women and a massacre of rebellious workers at a plantation. Indeed, the foretold death can be seen as exacting just deserts for the excesses of French rule, which gave way to America's involvement as it proclaimed itself preserving democracy.
Largely consigned to history now, both the French or the American ventures, but well worth resurrecting for their evidencing of the human capacity for unbridled excess in the name of nationalism, something of particular relevance now with the ongoing devastation in Gaza.
A particularly timely evocation of the imperialistic impulse, in short, Pham’s novel, bolstered by particularly fine writing but also hampered somewhat, to my mind, by a fragmentation of viewpoint which makes for occasional difficulty in a reader getting his bearings.

Beautifully written, but…
Virtually every character was loathsome…truly loathsome.
While all this reflected the coruscating effect of colonialism, it did not make for a pleasant read.
The cruelty was overwhelming.
For me, there was also major inconsistency in the characters’ depiction.
And the time shifts eere very confusing
I wanted to like this much more than I fid