Tuân is forty years old. Despite the cold of winter, he walks in the Chantilly forest with the hope of witnessing the first daffodils bloom. Slowly, he lets himself be invaded by the buried memories of his Indochinese childhood… Although he remains convinced of having been “almost perfectly happy until the age of twelve”, Tuân was nevertheless very early confronted with the terrible mystery of death. His parents were killed one night by thieves, who were themselves tried and brutally hanged in the presence of the seven-year-old child. Taken in by his grandfather whom he adores, the little boy will develop a taste for poetry and an immoderate love for the French language. But the grandfather also dies. He is then taken in by one of his aunts, Cô Anh. And in 1954, he watched helplessly as his aunt and her children – notably Tiên, his much-loved young cousin – left, forced to follow their husband and father, who had decided to join the popular army. use of the language of the “colonizers” makes him, in the eyes of his uncle, a “traitor to the homeland”, they also surely sign his destiny: his love of the French language and the poetry of Gérard de Nerval will be his viaticum, his talisman. She will support him, she will be his refuge, at the heart of the worst atrocities that he will experience and encounter while crossing his country torn by war, then by the partition of a bloodless Vietnam. Hoai Huong Nguyen makes us witnesses to the luminous rebirth of Tuân, thanks to the ephemeral force of flowers, the resonances of a language with what is most intimate in human beings, the virtue of poetry, even the darkest. With a perpetual oscillation between the past and the present, evoking childhood as well as the worst horrors of war, set with haikus. Under the burning sky, which summons the most subtle perfumes of Vietnam, is a moving ode to the French language and the vital and regenerative power of words.
About the Author
Hoai Huong Aubert-Nguyen is a French-speaking Vietnamese novelist and poet. She teaches communication at the University of Versailles-St-Quentin. She has published 4 novels : L’ombre douce/The soft shadow, 2013, for which she has received literary prizes in France (Prix Marguerite Audoux, Prix littéraire Asie de l’Adelf, Prix du Premier roman de Sablé, Prix Lire-Elire Bibliothèque pour tous Nord Flandres), Belgium (Prix Première-RTBF) and in Switzerland (Prix du salon du livre de Genève), Sous le ciel qui brûle/Under a burning sky, 2017 (Prix de la Renaissance française, Prix des cheminots du deuxième roman), Le cri de l’aurore/The cry of dawn, 2019 (Prix de la Ville aux livres) and Tendres ténèbres/Tender darkness, 2023. She has also published 3 collections of poetry : Parfums/Perfumes, 2005, Déserts/Deserts, 2009, and Feuilles sous le vent/Leaves under the wind, 2020. She has co-directed with Professor Michel Espagne Vietnam : A History of Cultural Transfers, a collection of contributions presented at a colloquium held at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the National Library of France in 2014.
