Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai 소설 "The Mountains Sing"

.

 

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, "The Mountains Sing" (2020)

 

 

베트남 시인/소설가 Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai의 소설이다.

줄거리는 "뉴욕 타임즈 서평"에서.

 

서평에서 두 구절만 인용한다. 작가가 이 소설을 영어로 쓰기로 한 이유를 읽으면서는, 영어 대신, 따로 이태리어를 배워서 이태리어로 소설 "Whereabouts"를 쓴

Jhumpa Lahiri가 생각난다.

 

"Que Mai contains her saga with a poet’s discipline, crafting spare and unsparing sentences, and uplifts it with a poet’s antenna for beauty in the most desolate circumstances. She evokes the landscape hauntingly, as a site of loss so profound it assumes the quality of fable."

 

"Que Mai has said that she chose to write “The Mountains Sing” in English to gain the distance a second language provides — a distance necessary to approach a disturbing history calmly. But writing in English also allows her to present to an audience in the United States a moving portrait of its former enemy, the North Vietnamese. Through her depiction of sympathetic characters suffering under a repressive regime, Que Mai offers us in “The Mountains Sing” a novel that, in more than one sense, remedies history."

 

다른 나라 사람들에 대해서 알고 싶으면 역시 소설을 읽는 게 제일이다. 이 소설에도 이런 이야기가 나온다:

 

"I found Mr. Basho's poems a few years ago, when I'd become a teacher and decided to learn about the Japanese. I wanted to understand why Japanese soldiers had done what they did in our country. The book I read told me that many Japanese are Buddhists like us. They worship their ancestors and love their families. Like us, they like to cook and eat, and dance, and sing." (p. 77)