The Mountains Sing : A Hauntingly Epic & Emotional Masterpiece

Posted On January 7, 2022

Hi Readers! Welcome to the first book review of the year! I have already read 2 books & rated them both at 5 stars, which you know is unique for me. The first one was Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, which is the 2^nd book in the Stormlight Archive series. I have never read anything quite so complex & intense, which is why I am not going to write its reviews.

But, the other book I read is The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, which was a beautifully curated masterpiece of survival during war. My favourite novels always tend to be war based historical fiction, because nothing else can evoke feelings like they can. And, this book, which I think is the most perfect novel ever written, has won me over like no other book in a long time. The Trần family will always remain in some corner of my heart.

~~TRIGGER WARNING~~

War, Death, Violence, Rape, Trauma, Depression, Alcohol Use, Abortion

~~GOODREADS DESCRIPTION~~

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.

~~CHARACTERS~~

~~Tran Dieu Lan~~

Tran Dieu Lan, aka Grandma, is the fierce woman in this novel who never backs down. The kind of hardships she has faced throughout her lifetime, and all those times she fought & came back stronger makes you love the character. In an otherwise dark novel, she is the one reason enough for you to continue reading. Because, after all, this is not just her story, it’s the story inspired by so many real people. From almost dying from starvation in the Great Famine, to getting thrown out of her own house because of the Land Reform, to leaving her children behind, to making a living on her own during the war-era, to finding those children back, to losing them again when they leave to fight in the war, to hoping they come back alive, to raising her granddaughter alone, to rebuilding her home again, Dieu Lan has seen it all in a span of 60 years. And, even after seeing so much, and seeing the death of many people close to her, she is still kind, forgiving & forever optimistic.  

~~Hương~~

The granddaughter of Dieu Lan is someone who I was indifferent to at the beginning of the story, but soon she grew on me. Her grandma’s braveness, kindness & hope rubbed off on her. Agreed, she was just a child in the first half of the book, but the way her latter chapters are written, there is just immense character development. Initially, she always had this hope that her parents & all her uncles will come back from the war. But, after her mother Ngoc comes back from the war, she grows up. And suddenly there isn’t only just this one angle to her thoughts & personality. She becomes so much more.

~~Minh, Ngọc, Đạt, Thuận, Hạnh & Sáng~~

Dieu Lan has 6 children. You might think it is impossible to remember them or even bond with them. But, once you get used to knowing them, you immediately form a special bond with each one of these 6 children. Minh is barely present in the story, which is why the longing to meet him is always persistent for the readers. Ngọc is young Hương’s mother, so she is always the mother in the story for us. Uncle Đạt imprints on the readers right away. Aunt Hạnh is a constant for the family. Uncle Sáng, the youngest of the children becomes a bitter-sweet presence to readers. And, even though we know very little about Uncle Thuận, we are always reminded of him.

The funny thing is we see all these 6 as little kids in the first parallel of the story told by Grandma. And, as the story progresses in that parallel, we watch them become adults while still being kids. Not only were they forced to flee from their ancestral home, but they had to walk 100+ kilometres so that they were not executed. They were abandoned by their mother during this journey & did not know when or if she would come back for them. And then, in the other parallel told by Hương, we know that all of them are actual adults fighting in the war. One by one they come back home wounded by the war, physically, mentally & emotionally. This contrast of watching them as wounded kids & then wounded adults was striking & really brought the story alive mirroring a very real picture for the readers.

~~THOUGHTS~~

~~SIGNIFICANCE OF WARTIME HISTORICAL FICTION~~

The thing about reading wartime historical fiction, is not just about the hype of getting destroyed while reading a book, but more importantly about understanding the war itself & how it impacted the common man. I have read books about Europe during World War I (The Alice Network) & World War II (The Nightingale), Japan & Korea during World War II (Pachinko), Syria during Syrian Civil War (The Beekeeper of Aleppo), Afghanistan during war (A Thousand Splendid Suns.) I have loved all these novels because of strong female protagonists and/or strong bond between multigenerational families. We see a similar multigenerational saga in The Mountains Sing during 2 wars in Vietnam. In every single one of these books, I was emotionally destroyed just reading about it. It is quite naïve to say that war is cruel & it costs humanity in major ways. But no matter how naïve, it is after all the truth. Every time I read such a book, I research about the wars & get to know the horrifying truths.

Reading The Mountains Sing is 90% about reading sad story after sad story with only 10% of happy moments. Yet, maybe because of this imbalance, it stays with the reader for a long time. Even though this is only a 342-page novel, it feels like a lot more because it spans 50 long years of struggle, hardships & layer upon layer of gut-wrenching pain. Like I have said for several other novels, this one should be mandatory reading for today’s youth so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

~~HOW PEOPLE CHANGE BECAUSE OF WAR~~

In The Mountains Sing, we read about how the war leaves an impact on all the characters. When Sáng returns from the war he so much as denounces his own mother because she becomes a trader. Because he is so drawn to the Party & its propaganda that he cannot see his mother’s actions as anything else. He cannot see that his mother had no other option to survive. She did the best for her & her granddaughter’s survival. When Đạt returns, we can see that he needs alcohol to run away from the demons of his days at war. When Ngọc returns, she suffers from PTSD. She is barely a person & cannot give any love to her own daughter. With these three, we see how being in the war changes them.

And then we have Grandma who is out of the war, but still we see how it changes her. She has to choose to earn her livelihood by doing something that made her a pariah in her community. But because she earned from it, she completely rebuilds her home with 3 bedrooms. Because even though war had broken her into pieces, some of those pieces still hoped for the return of her dear children who might need to stay in those bedrooms. And, Hương simply is not able to comprehend why her mother couldn’t be her mother anymore. When these two sets of people come together, naturally there was friction. Navigating these familial bonds became so complicated because they had all suffered the war in different ways, but unfortunately these different ways were all incompatible with each other. Even though they were the same family, the war had changed them in ways one cannot begin to imagine. Every single one of them had different coping mechanisms to deal with it, and I think that’s important. Sometimes people just need time to cope so that they can then move forward with their lives.

~~BACKROUND INFO ABOUT THE WAR (From WiKi)~~

First Indochina War (19 Dec 1946 – 1 Aug 1954)

The First Indochina War (generally known as the Indochina War in France, and as the Anti-French Resistance War in Vietnam) began in French Indochina on December 19, 1946, and lasted until July 20, 1954. Fighting between French forces and their Việt Minh opponents in the south dated from September 1945. The conflict pitted a range of forces, including the French Union’s French Far East Expeditionary Corps, led by the government of France and supported by the former emperor Bảo Đại’s Vietnamese National Army against the People’s Army of Vietnam and Việt Minh (part of the Communist Party), led by Võ Nguyên Giáp and Hồ Chí Minh.

Second Indochina War (1 Nov 1955 – 30 Apr 1975)

The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and other anti-communist allies. The war, considered a Cold War-era proxy war by some, lasted almost 20 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973.

~~WHY YOU SHOULD READ THE MOUNTAINS SING~~

I found it appalling that this book was published in 2020 & yet it had so few reviews on Goodreads. This debut book from Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai deserves a whole lot more than that. This book is literally perfect, with no flaws in it. Inspired from real experiences, this novel is a benchmark in Asian Historical Fiction. The intensity of adversity flows poignantly from the pages giving us characters you cry with & cry for. This is a wildly underrated book which needs more eyes, more praise, more highlight & just more love. If you haven’t read it yet, please do! I have rated it at 5/5 stars!

Until next time,