The Tapestries
A Novel
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
A boy takes a harrowing journey to manhood in early 1900s Vietnam in this "daringly complex and vividly imagined debut novel" based on a true story (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Dan Nguyen is seven years old when he witnesses his father brutally beheaded by the mayor of his town in a bid for power. Already married to a woman twenty years his senior, Dan's wife Ven makes him promise to one day avenge his father's death. In order to protect him until he is old enough to defend his family's honor, Ven hides Dan as a slave in his enemy's house.
As years pass, Dan falls in love with the one person he can never have, the mayor's beautiful granddaughter Tai May. Dan's journey from slavery into scandal, and finally to the royal court where he has the chance to win Tai May's heart, is a story of spellbinding drama, intrigue, and love. Following his critically acclaimed memoir, The Unwanted, Kien Nguyen shares this epic tale based loosely on the life of his grandfather, a professional embroiderer in the court of Vietnam's last king.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nguyen follows his acclaimed memoir, The Unwanted (2001), with a daringly complex and vividly imagined debut novel about a boy who fights to reclaim his family's royal legacy in Vietnam at the turn of the century. Seven-year-old Dan Nguyen is married in childhood to a 27-year-old family servant named Ven, who hides and protects the boy when rivals come to execute Dan's parents. But Dan's strange union with Ven is disrupted when Ven contracts malaria and she is forced to sell him into slavery to the mayor's family. Dan's stint as a slave proves fateful, though, when he becomes the personal servant of the beautiful Tai May and the two fall in love. In spite of Dan's station, Tai May chooses him over a wealthy young suitor. When the spurned suitor spies on Dan and finds out about his marriage to Ven, Dan is forced to flee the family. The dizzying intricacy of the plotting occasionally becomes a bit overwhelming as Nguyen tracks Ven's tragic fate and Dan's search for Tai May while attempting to piece together a treasure map that has been laid out as an interlocking series of body tattoos. But the beauty of Nguyen's stately, ornate prose perfectly suited to the rigidly formal customs of Vietnamese royalty serves him well as the complex plot unfolds. The scope of the tale and its grace and power make this a formidable first novel.
