The Young Die Old

Description

The Young Die Old tells two parallel stories: the first starts as Trường gets married to a woman of obscure origin. All the flawed characters are drawn together in the common quest for the treasure believed to be open when Nghê (Vietnamse mythical animal with mixed features of lions and wild dogs) turns up. The other line of story is an expedition on a buffalo wagon, of unrelated, nameless people engaged in nonsensical dialogues, to a mysterious place in an unidentified permanent stasis of time and space. The two paths are woven together to represent the contrasts of life in a parallelism between harsh realism and magical symbols and illusions.

Idiosyncratic, seamlessly-crafted, daringly arresting and ambitious, full of wry humour, The Young Die Old is an evocation of love, memory, and of being a human. Undoubtedly a tour de force in Vietnamese contemporary literature.