Chronicles of a Village

“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

“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