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Chronicles of a Village

By Nguyen Thanh Hien
Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters
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Brief 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,... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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An incantatory poetic novel that interweaves the legends, tragedies, and histories of a village in Vietnam

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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 neighbours—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 eternalises 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."

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780300276404

Publisher: Yale University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 14 May 2024

Country: United States

Imprint: Yale University Press

Contributors:

  • Translated by Quyen Nguyen-Hoang

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 144

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Nguyen Thanh Hien Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters

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.

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