An incantatory poetic novel that interweaves the legends, tragedies, and histories of a village in Vietnam. 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. Nguyen Thanh Hien’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.”
