Fionnáin reviewed Water: A Chronicle by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn
Overlapping stories with many voices
4 stars
I discovered this strange book on the shelf of a bookshop and picked it up on a whim. It's a novel by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, who I understand is a celebrated novelist in Vietnam. The story takes place in a realm that is slightly surreal, with each chapter bouncing to a different character's first person narrative, each with a very different voice and perspective.
How one affects another is hard to gauge, as the motivations for each character is very different. In one chapter a person has left a tap running that has flooded a valley (and seems almost destined to flood the whole world) where the narrator in a chapter shortly following this has accidentally escaped from prison and is slowly becoming a mouse. So preoccupied is the latter with their own predicament, they seem to pass little heed of other events.
The thread that binds all the stories …
I discovered this strange book on the shelf of a bookshop and picked it up on a whim. It's a novel by Ngọc Tư Nguyễn, who I understand is a celebrated novelist in Vietnam. The story takes place in a realm that is slightly surreal, with each chapter bouncing to a different character's first person narrative, each with a very different voice and perspective.
How one affects another is hard to gauge, as the motivations for each character is very different. In one chapter a person has left a tap running that has flooded a valley (and seems almost destined to flood the whole world) where the narrator in a chapter shortly following this has accidentally escaped from prison and is slowly becoming a mouse. So preoccupied is the latter with their own predicament, they seem to pass little heed of other events.
The thread that binds all the stories is a woman and her tearful baby, and some unspoken tragedy. It's a beautiful, bizarre and compelling novel. It seems from the translator's note that a lot of the language is colloquial and the story is weird in its original form, so it may be impossible to translate perfectly into English. But even with that, I found this book brilliant, touching, compelling and utterly bizarre.