Description

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.

Nguye n Thanh Hie n’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.”

Publisher Review

“Vietnamese writer Nguyen Thanh Hien’s prose is expertly rendered in this English translation, which conveys the text’s beauty and violence with dazzling lucidity. . . Every phrase of every page is, simply put, pitch-perfect.”-Mike Fu, award citation, Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation

“Dreams and fantasies, reality and fiction are woven into this groundbreaking novel, meticulously translated with care and love. To read Chronicles of a Village is to close your eyes and let the sounds, sights, and scents take you to unexpected-and unforgettable-places. The translator’s notes at the back of the book are invaluable.”-Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

“This is the experience of rural Vietnam prismed as if through half-remembered dreams, shimmering visions, lingering memories. Surrealistic, poetic, vibrant Chronicles of a Village gifts the reader with a weave of exquisite fragments of poetical prose that creates the essence of that troubled and beautiful country. Nguyen Thanh Hien’s writing gives one the sense of not just visiting Vietnam but of living it, breathing it in through an effervescent melange of myth and hard history and legend and landscape.”-Wayne Karlin, author Wandering Souls

“Nguyen Thanh Hien’s Chronicles of a Village undulates with the ebb and flow of the waters and the caress of the wind through the grass. While ostensibly a cowherd’s story set against the French colonial invasion, the narrative style is so much dreamier than that precis might suggest. The elliptical, often humorous forays into the folkloric chronicle create a sense of baroque metatextualism, and the incantatory, open sentences recall Jon Fosse and Mathias Enard, but undulate with an animism and fecundity that could only have been written by Nguyen.”-Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

“In language that holds the tremor and tremulousness of the changing histories of generations, of bird and soil and humans and sleep, Chronicles of a Village reminds us of the exigencies of belonging and believing in the earth.”-Sumana Roy, author of Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries