The Mountains Sing

 By: Nguyen Phan Que Mai 

Location: FIC QUE

Genre: Historical Fiction, Asia, War

“An epic account of Viet Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.” —VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“That night and for the next many nights, to dry my tears, Grandma opened the door of her childhood to me. Her stories scooped me up and delivered me to the hilltop of Nghe An where I could fill my lungs with the fragrance of rice fields, sink my eyes into the Lam River, and become a green dot on the Truong Son mountain range. In her stories, I tasted the sweetness of sim berries on my tongue, felt grasshoppers kicking in my hands, and slept in a hammock under a sky woven by shimmering stars…I was astonished when Grandma told me how her life had been cursed by a fortune-teller’s prediction, and how she had survived the French occupation, the Japanese invasion, the Great Hunger, and the Land Reform…”
- Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Mountains Sing

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Tran family, set against the backdrop of the Viet Nam War. Tran Dieu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Noi, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Ho Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that will tear not just her beloved country but her family apart.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Viet Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope. This is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s first novel in English.

"The uncomplicated characters, the anecdotal nature of the storytelling, and the expositional dialogue gives The Mountains Sing a fable-like quality. While certainly realistic, with bursts of violence and suffering aplenty, this is not intended as a gritty war novel. Rather, it is the journey of a nation as it splits apart and grows together again, symbolized by a family that follows the same path. Quế Mai celebrates simple virtues, such as kindness, hope, and tenacity, but does so with passion and poignancy.

I think I will recall The Mountains Sing in a very particular way. Fiction can do what nonfiction often cannot: it can forge empathy across space and time. Even if I forget the details and plot-points, that message of empathy will remain.

Going forward, I won’t be able to read a book about Vietnam – whether fiction or non – without being reminded of The Mountains Sing. Quế Mai strips away the otherness of the North Vietnamese that permeates so many Western retellings of the war, and replaces a shadowy enemy with individuals brimming with humanity, living lives not unlike our own.- Matt