"Mountains on flat land"

Young author Vo Dinh Duy is a member of the Gia Lai Literature and Arts Association in 2023, majoring in poetry. Duy's poems are also very new, full of evocative images, published in newspapers and magazines such as: Army Literature, Gia Lai Literature Magazine, White Shirt Newspaper, Gia Lai Newspaper... since 2012, but then Duy stopped writing.

Then in 2024, when participating in the novel and memoir writing camp organized by the People's Police Publishing House in April 2024, Duy was inspired to write again. And when writing again, not poetry or short stories, but the first book Duy introduced was a novel full of legendary colors, hidden meanings of time, messages of the times and the concerns of young people about a land full of cultural colors that is gradually being swept away, changed, transformed by modern life and the desire to find traces of the past was meticulously portrayed by Duy in "Mountains on Flat Land" (Literature Publishing House, June 2025).

The story, both imbued with fairy tales, myths and cultural colors of Maccot town, was successfully built. The thread of the sensitive past nurtured the friends of the generation B'la, I, H'hoai, Po Y, Li Et, the mysterious stories about red moss, about customs, about people in Maccot town were created by author Vo Dinh Duy in a unified and smooth way. Readers can easily imagine this new but old land, it seems that from a cultural perspective, readers can still easily imagine the landscape and people here, not too separate from life. This town seems to be a town that we have been to, known before the whirlwind of commerce came and changed everything from native trees, to houses, to people.

The mysteries hidden in the stories are not without reason, the intertwined relationships of trees, people, mountains, and lakes are skillfully conveyed by the author with messages of life without any forcedness. Perhaps, because he started out as an architect and is now returning to painting, exploring the lacquer genre, the space design in the author's novels easily touches the reader's senses.

With the arrangement of putting all the data into the first chapter, making the first chapter like a maze full of turns that makes the reader have to stretch all their senses to process. The details are scattered but focus on a specific point that is the mysterious red moss that causes red death to the young people in the town, making everyone panic and scared.

The fragments of the story told by those who witnessed B'la's death do not form a whole, but only highlight the mysteriousness of the town like an illusion being stripped bare under tourism exploitation activities. Is this a warning from nature or a mystery that needs to be solved?

After the intentional rush of the first chapter, the following chapters gradually unfold the events gently so that readers can easily imagine what is mysterious and attractive about Maccot town. The stories unfold slowly, evoking images that are both convincing because they have seen them somewhere, and images like in a dream of a peaceful fairyland with ancient Maccot trees with special delicious fruits that make wine, cakes and also bring along a tourism potential for the town. The blue-tailed bird of the Mpú Toh-Kong festival, the coming of age ceremony of the children of the flat land, big mountains, big lakes and the Bo fields of childhood have connected the children like that.

And then, from the coming-of-age festival, my character failed to get the red stone and escaped to the city. The author's description suddenly changed, so that the city was the bare, modern and crowded city that everyone knew, like a way of peeling people off, pushing my character's loneliness to the climax. Yet the character of the fairyland still kept up with modernity, drawing for himself an uncertain future in the new land, only until the death of B'la, a childhood friend, came, did the new friends come back and see the unstable rhythm spreading throughout their childhood town.

Dr. Ha Thanh Van commented that the novel "Mountains on Flat Land" by Vo Dinh Duy is a debut literary work released in 2025, marking a surprising transition from a young architect living in Gia Lai to the journey of creating a literary world. The novel "Mountains on Flat Land" has led readers into the wild, silent land of Maccot, where reality and fantasy, science and the supernatural, individual and community, legend and truth, coexist in overlapping layers of space and feeling, with a mystical literary quality, fragmented narrative structure and unique spatial design ability, a strong architectural mark in a fictional text.

As an architect, Vo Dinh Duy has shown his ability to “design fictional spaces” very naturally in novels. The space in “Mountains on Flat Land” is not the background but the character, a character who can breathe, whisper, and react to pain and loss. In a literary world increasingly technologized and flattened globally, “Mountains on Flat Land” carrying echoes from the forest, from the rocks, from the streams, from places “beyond reality”. It is a passionate call echoing from the pages of the novel: listen to the space, because who knows, maybe there are souls rising there.”

Following the friends who want to find the answer to B'la's death, readers will connect the events together to find the core of the big lake, where the tourist project is always covered with corrugated iron, where the big explosion caused disturbances in the peaceful land. Perhaps Duy's advantage in Art and the unpretentious but impressive way of describing the scene has made it easy for readers to blend into the space of the big mountain on the flat land without a bit of question or confusion. And although this is the first time trying to write a novel, Duy's way of systematizing and solving the story still attracts readers in his own way.

Source: https://baogialai.com.vn/nui-tren-dat-bang-post560335.html