Tag Archives: Nghi Vo

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

by Rebecca

Into the Riverlands
by Nghi Vo
2022

I had somehow failed to notice the publication of this third part of The Singing Hills Cycle, sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, but am delighted to have found it now. Each novella stands alone, but they show the experiences of Cleric Chih and Almost Brilliant in their exploration of the world in search of stories and histories to bring back to their abbey.

While this world has always had a certain magical element, this book is more traditionally wuxia than the previous two. Chih is not a martial artist, and they are present as a witness rather than a direct actor of events, but there are current events of bandits and martial arts masters as well as legends of heroes and villains, and there’s a real question of how much or little overlap there is between the tales and the truth, with each of the characters having their own opinions too.

I’d already commented in my review of Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water that it fits in well with this series, but I was reminded of it even more when reading this newest novella. I also felt both ridiculous for not noticing immediately and a bit proud of myself for realizing eventually that the jianghu, where most wuxia stories are set, translates directly to “riverlands”.

This book is only 100 pages long, but it packs a lot of rich details into those pages without ever feeling rushed. When I finished the book, I also had to go back an re-read the beginning again to see these characters in the context of the completed story. It’s a really beautifully written story with multiple interesting perspectives on how history is told.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Anna

By Nghi Vo

Nghi Vo must have had this novel in the chamber ready to go, because it was published mere months after The Great Gatsby left copyright in January 2021. So, to brush off my decades-old literature degree, The Great Gatsby is basically a character study of one man, the titular Jay Gatsby, and the character is also more a metaphor for the corrupting deception of the “American Dream” than an fleshed out person. There’s a lot of room to fill out the lives, thoughts, and feelings of all the characters, and Nghi Vo does that very well.

The narrator is Jordan, the thinnest of the central five characters in the original, so with the most room for creative exploration, and Nghi Vo sure takes advantage of that! She’s now Vietnamese, adopted as an infant by a wealthy white missionary, and now in young adulthood doing her best to ignore anything that makes her stand out from the other bright young things. She is also untrained but agile in the Eastern magic of paper cutting, and this magical element is what really diverges from the source.

It is mostly incidental to the plot but fascinating, and there were several times where I wish the novel had thrown out the source plot entirely to just explore this magical and much more diverse world. On the one hand, the multi-dimensional Jordan, Nick, Daisy, and Tom are more interesting to read about in detail (Gatsby remains a bit of an enigma); on the other hand, those details somewhat undo the pivotal central message and theme of the original.

The very act of adding dimension negates the sense of a flat façade that Fitzgerald created, but Nghi Vo also plays with that idea in interesting, and occasionally very literal ways, as with the magical paper cutting creating animated illusions. I think in the end, I found the book more interesting than enjoyable, and not up to the very high standards of her previous two novellas, which Rebecca reviewed last year, but with all that, I still think it is well worth the read.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

by Rebecca

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
by Nghi Vo
2020

This is a companion novella to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, not a sequel or a prequel, but a companion: another experience of Cleric Chih. It doesn’t have the same calm mood of the other, and I didn’t enjoy it quiet as much, but it’s still really very good and a fascinating story that deals more directly in the magical realism of this world. It’s also another beautifully crafted example of complex story telling with both a framing story and an interior story. It felt like a combination of Scheherazade and Rashomon, as it deals with the use of storytelling as a way to survive the night and with conflicting versions of the same story.

I definitely recommend it.

Also, a minor spoiler:

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The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

by Rebecca

The Empress of Salt and Fortune
by Nghi Vo
2020

I can’t remember how this book got onto my to-read list, and it was there for a while before I got around to starting, but I’m glad I did. It’s lovely. It’s quite short – only 120 pages – but it’s beautifully, almost lyrically written. It’s also really interesting as an example of story crafting. The tone and the content of the book are in such stark contrast.

The tone of the book is very calm and quiet — contemplative, almost dreamlike. The world is a casually magic ancient China: there’s magic and mysticism, but it’s not the point of the story and it’s not particularly relevant, it’s just how the world is. An archivist cleric with a bird companion arrives at an old estate to make records of it, before moving on to their next assignment. The only other person there is an old servant woman. That’s the story.

In contrast, the topic of the book is the Empress of Salt and Fortune. She has recently died after a long and successful reign, but this old estate that the cleric is taking records of is the place of exile where she had lived for six years as a young woman before she came to power. The old servant woman, Rabbit, was her companion in those years. The empress is an amazing character: delightful and complex and ruthless and clever, and her plotting is dangerous and deadly. And the reader and the cleric learn about her from seeing the estate and hearing Rabbit’s stories.

In some ways this book reminds me of The Hands of the Emperor in that all the massive political upheavals happened in the past, all the anxiety gone and all the grief muted by time. In some ways it reminds me of Iron Widow in the way the empress is ruthless and vicious and hurting and victorious. And of course all three of them are about taking power and surviving. But it is also very much it’s own story and a fascinating read. I definitely recommend it.