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An incantatory poetic novel that interweaves the legends, tragedies, and histories of a village in Vietnam "The book bursts with characters, poetry, philosophy, romance, violence, and struggle. . . . A dreamlike, original, strangely hopeful book."—Kirkus Reviews
At the foot of Mun Mountain in central Vietnam, a self-appointed scribe collects the stories of his neighbors—tales of love, nature, and war—and weaves them into a surrealist history of their farming community. In crystalline fragments resembling prose poems, the scribe eternalizes the vanishing beauty and tragic transformation of the village—its sacred forests, astonishing animals, mythical figures, and human lives nurtured by a profound love for soil and sky, as well as its catastrophes: ecological destruction, political purges, asphyxiating modernity, violence, and indoctrination in the name of progress.
Nguyễn Thanh Hiện's Chronicles of a Village, the writer's first work to be translated into English, is an elegy for a place and a people; a profound meditation on how history is created, destroyed, manipulated, and rewritten; and a tribute to the beauty and "fatal historical disabilities of a land.&rdquo
An incantatory poetic novel that interweaves the legends, tragedies, and histories of a village in Vietnam "The book bursts with characters, poetry, philosophy, romance, violence, and struggle. . . . A dreamlike, original, strangely hopeful book."—Kirkus Reviews
At the foot of Mun Mountain in central Vietnam, a self-appointed scribe collects the stories of his neighbors—tales of love, nature, and war—and weaves them into a surrealist history of their farming community. In crystalline fragments resembling prose poems, the scribe eternalizes the vanishing beauty and tragic transformation of the village—its sacred forests, astonishing animals, mythical figures, and human lives nurtured by a profound love for soil and sky, as well as its catastrophes: ecological destruction, political purges, asphyxiating modernity, violence, and indoctrination in the name of progress.
Nguyễn Thanh Hiện's Chronicles of a Village, the writer's first work to be translated into English, is an elegy for a place and a people; a profound meditation on how history is created, destroyed, manipulated, and rewritten; and a tribute to the beauty and "fatal historical disabilities of a land.&rdquo
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
About the Author-
Nguyễn Thanh Hiện (b. 1940), one of the most important writers in Vietnam, is the author of numerous novels, poems, and short stories. Chronicles of a Village is his first work to be translated into English. He lives in Qui Nhơn, Vietnam. Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a widely published writer, translator, and art curator, and is winner of a Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation. She lives in Saigon, Vietnam.
Reviews-
February 15, 2024 A small village in Central Vietnam weathers political upheaval, social change, and the vicissitudes of history and time in the author's first novel to be translated into English. In a series of loosely linked chapters, the son of a plowman-poet evokes his childhood in a sleepy, unnamed village at the foot of the Mun Mountains. As a boy he herds cows and scares birds away from the family rice crop. In a jacket woven of mountain palm leaves, he plays happily in the rain. The villagers' quotidian worries over weather, rice, and cotton are disrupted by warring political ideologies and "the blood-soaked purge of [their] homeland..." People disappear without warning. The narrator's father is taken away for being "lettered"; his mother, killed in a bomb raid. Later he loses his first sweetheart and his brother. Regimes topple and change. But the stories go on. In dreamy, discursive prose written with no capital letters, with commas and few periods, the narrator loops back and forth from present to past, to local myths passed down through the generations, excerpts from a local 18th-century writer, tales of French colonists, reminiscences about the village's first radio, words of a childhood lullaby: "these are the chronicles of my village, the vessels of remembering and reminiscing, tale upon tale of yesterday, yesteryear, yestercentury or yestermillenia, now plainly precise, now hazily adrift, an abundance, or maybe an overabundance..." While there's no plot in the traditional sense, the book bursts with characters, poetry, philosophy, romance, violence, and struggle. "my village remained a small fragment of the world," the narrator explains, "and yet it carried all of the aspirations ever possessed by mankind..." In the world of the book, history is shifting, plastic. Even the dead can sometimes return. "history is only a draft copy, son...," the deceased father tells him. "nothing is true." A dreamlike, original, strangely hopeful book.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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