Chronicles of a Village

by Nguyen Thanh Hien, Quyen Nguyen-Hoang (Translator)

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300276404
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

The book bursts with characters, poetry, philosophy, romance, violence, and struggle. . . . A dreamlike, original, strangely hopeful book.”—Kirkus Reviews

“What makes Chronicles of a Village a truly revelatory pleasure to read is its dialectical portrayal of the sublime and the monstrous. . . . Reads like a meditative text.”—World Literature Today

“The narrator’s ability to observe, question and listen are the seeds of an enduring love for his village and its environs. . . . Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s act of translation has brought Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s endeavour of remembering and forgetting to an audience beyond one that is solely Vietnamese-speaking, intensity captured in lyrical form.”—Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

“Chronicles of a Village speaks to the dangers of stories written through state power in its many and varied masks. Resisting myopia at the same time as not making judgments about the future is a difficult balancing act that requires careful humility. [This] is one example of a writer and a narrator who makes a significant effort to do so.”—Vagabond City

“Simply elegant. One would expect nothing less from Nguyễn Thanh Hiện given his illustrious literary career. . . . What is a surprise is that this is the first book translated into English.”—Asian Review of Books

“Hypnotic, wide-ranging, and thoroughly immersive.”—Words Without Borders

“Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s genre-bending Chronicles of a Village, in a fabulous translation by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, . . . [is] a maximalist tale.”—Alex Tan, Asymptote Journal

“Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’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.”—Nguyễn Phan Quế 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. Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s writing gives one the sense of not just visiting Vietnam but of living it, breathing it in through an effervescent mélange of myth and hard history and legend and landscape.”—Wayne Karlin, author Wandering Souls

“Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’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 Nguyễn.”—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

From the Publisher

2024-01-20
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.

Kirkus Reviews