Review: The Mountains Sing

The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is another one I fell for from the back-cover copy.

I’m a sucker for multi-generational family sagas, and I’m always on the lookout for good ethnic fiction. This checked both those boxes.

Unfortunately, while I admire the ambition of this, it’s just not a very good book.

At a narrative level, we have a confusing dual narrator structure where our protagonist tells us some of the story and her grandmother tells the rest. That might work, and might even be interesting, but Que never really develops her characters. Neither really explores her thoughts about the colonial situation of their Vietnamese home. They talk about home and family, but they don’t reflect on the forces that they embrace in the ideological war that has torn their country apart. We hear slogans, but we don’t get substantive self-reflection. In a novel that seems to want to critique sloganeering, it’s frustrating not to get a real alternative.

At the same time, the prose is often awful. At one point, one character says to another, without apparent irony, “Try to bear the burden of your destiny.” Another describes her parents’ relationship by saying, “It seemed the river of their love never stopped flowing.”

The story is harrowing with each character bearing he brunt of one of the many humanitarian crises of the second half of Vietnam’s second half of the 20th Century. But it gets increasingly difficult to distinguish one thread from the other. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic; this does inspire to me to concern. It’s just that I’m as drawn to explore that concern in an Encyclopedia as I am with the rest of the story.

But the real problem for me is in the dialogue. In some of my own writing, I’ve tried to explore the sense that speakers rarely hear each other. I like to see how it works to have them talk over each other or mishear.

In contrast, every conversation here is straightforward. Characters listen to each other and respond. One will make a confession, and the other will forgive. The result is a perpetually stilted, almost contrived dialogue. It feels artificial in a way that amplifies the superficial character building elsewhere.

It’s good to be reminded here of the seemingly endless horrors of Vietnam. After that, though, this falls short of the back-cover copy. I wish I could have liked it more, but it’s left me frustrated rather than inspired.


View all my reviews