CHRONICLES OF A VILLAGE

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.