SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

“It wasn’t me who turned everything upside down. It was Dostoevsky!”—says Rassoul, the protagonist of this novel.

 

“Stop going on about your precious Dosto—whatever! You didn’t kill because you’d read his book. You read it because you wanted to kill. That’s all. If he were still alive, he would accuse you of plagiarism!”—Old clerk, interviewing Rassoul.

In this ironic and absurd quotation suggesting some of the many parallels between the action in this novel and that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, author Atiq Rahimi focuses on the psychological state of mind of Rassoul, an Afghan student who studied for years in St. Petersburg, Russia, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, before returning to his home in Kabul, a city occupied by the Russians and their army from 1979 -1989. For Rassoul, whose very name suggests his similarities to Raskolnikov, Kabul in the 1980s bears no resemblance to the exciting, intellectual, and independent city it was a generation earlier. The city itself is now devastated, its educated citizens now unable to work in any meaningful job, and no one is sure of who is really in charge – the Russians, the Muslim mujahideen, the Afghan communists (like his father), or those seeking independence from all these competing interests. What is certain is that none of the ordinary citizens have any money, all are hungry and cold, and the only escape – at least for Rassoul and his friends – is to be found at the saqi-khana, where a plethora of drugs offers them temporary respite.

Author photo by Bertrand Guay, Agence Presse.

As the book opens, Rassoul has  just killed an old woman with an axe. Though he is reluctant to take her jewelry and money, he finally decides to take only the cash, but, ironically, no matter how hard he tries, he is unable to pry the wad of bills out of the dead woman’s grip. When he hears someone calling her name, “Nana Alia,” he escapes, not knowing who the “intruder” is, and blaming Dostoevsky for “stopping me from…killing a second woman, this one innocent…and becoming prey to my remorse, sinking into an abyss of guilt, [and] ending up sentenced to hard labour…” Calling himself “a pathetic excuse for a murderer,” he notes that he has “blood on [his] hands, but nothing in [his] pockets.” His mother, sister, and fiancée, whom he cannot marry without money, have all depended upon him, and he has failed to provide for their future.

Burkha shop.  Photo by Reuters, Mohammad Shoiab, 2009, in Afghanistan. See photo credits for more information.

When he waits, watching to see who has come to the old woman’s house just after her death, he sees a woman in a “sky-blue chador” leaving the house and rushing away, but he has difficulty catching up with her, and when he finally meets her eyes “through the gauze of her chador,” he does not recognize her. Later, when he wants to check on the old woman’s body, he learns that there is no body. The person he killed has vanished. Like Raskolnikov, he returns to his own house, notes his crime, and then falls into feverish sleep. When he wakes up, he cannot speak, except through writing.

His additional problems with his landlord, to whom he owes rent, add to his woes, and as his friends reflect the competing beliefs which are tearing the country apart, he learns with horror of his beloved Sophia’s predicament regarding her family and their problems paying their rent. His health, never strong, begins to fail, his mind wanders, he is unable to make decisions, and the doctor he finally decides to see tells him he must relive whatever emotional situation is causing his loss of voice, a prescription which infuriates him and increases his terror regarding the future.  Flashbacks of his past in the years before the Russians haunt him.

Liquor Shop (Saqi-Khana) c.1890 (w/c on paper), Punjabi School, (19th century) / © Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library

Through Rassoul’s diary, the author reveals Rassoul’s life as a young man in Mazar-e-Sharif; his love for Sophia; the corruption of those in power, one of whom has made money by selling items from the National Archives; the murders that occur as one group takes over power and retaliates against members of other groups, making them “pay” for their “crimes”; and the bombing and shelling in the city which the Russians now “control.” Real accounts alternate with nightmares and fever dreams, which torment Rassoul, and when two men from the Ministry of Information and Culture come to interview him and ask him which “side” he is on, he can only write, “None.”

Shah-e do Shamshira Wali Mosque, where Sophia, Rassoul’s love, offends the authorities.

Atiq Rahimi, who emigrated from Afghanistan to France when he was in his twenties, speaks throughout the novel with the authority of someone who has lived through the traumas of his main characters, a characteristic which also pervades an earlier novel, Earth and Ashes.   Modeling this novel on Crime and Punishment, widely read by westerners, Rahimi shows the universality of the horrors and the psychological traumas created by a sense of guilt in a character from Kabul, at least as intense as that of Raskolnikov from the culturally more familiar St. Petersburg.  Raskolnikov’s crime was personal, and the punishment that he both seeks and rejects, while philosophically complex, is more personal than the crime of Rassoul. Rassoul’s crime grows out of the chaos in Kabul in the 1980s, in which ordinary people do not know who is in charge from day to day, or which “philosophy” provides the moral compass, if any, for its leaders.

Rose Garden at the Zarnegar Palace and Park, Kabul, in the 1970s, before all the wars.

The intense and dramatic circumstances under which Rassoul must finally come to terms with his crime in the context of the Kabul of his day provides an absurd coda to his personal travails. “I want my death to be a sacrifice,” he says. “My trial will be on behalf of all war criminals: communists, warlords, mercenaries….” His interrogator is not interested. “Stop thinking you are that Dostoevky character, please. His act only made sense within the context of his society, his religion,” he says ironically.  As Rassoul is left to make sense of his actions and their results, the reader is forced to consider how much free will a character like Rassoul has when trying to save lives in the context of war and the chaos which accompanies it. Ultimately, Rassoul is forced to consider whether he is the victim of his own crime, or whether, in fact, “Even the flies are singing for [him].”

ALSO by Atiq Rahimi:  EARTH AND ASHES

Zarnegar Park, 2009.  All that is left of the Rose Garden.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Bertrand Guay at Agence France-Presse appears here:  http://www.ledevoir.com/

Throughout, the author and translator make no distinction between the full burkha and the “sky-blue chador,” which a woman was wearing when she left the building where Nana Alia was killed.  The character in “sky-blue chador” in the novel, which took place in the 1980s, supposedly looked at Rassoul “through the gauze of her chador,” which implies the full burhka and not the simple chador head covering which shows the woman’s entire face.  http://www.reuters.com/

The watercolor of the Liquor Shop (Saqi-Khana) c.1890 (w/c on paper), Punjabi School, (19th century) / © Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library, may be found here:  http://www.bridgemanart.com/ Rassoul and his friends spent much time at the local saqi-khana escaping from the traumas of their lives.

The photo of the  Shah-e do Shamshira Wali Mosque where Sophia ran afoul of the authorities is from  http://en.wikipedia.org/

The Zarnegar Park in Kabul, in the 1970s, is found on http://afghanistanonmymind.blogspot.com

The remains of the rose garden in the same Zarnegar Park in 2009 are shown on http://afghanistanonmymind.blogspot.com/

ARC:  Other Press

“The war you fought…was one of neither glory nor grandeur. It was a war for survival, a war to live long enough to see the sun come up the next day or to wake up to the feeling of rain on your skin. A war for bread, a war against the cold, a war for a dry place to sleep. A war that has no borders to defend, no bridges to destroy: the war of life.”–Dr. Modo, medical examiner, to the body of Matteo Diotallevi, “Tette,” about seven years of age.

When the body of a thin little orphan, guarded by a small dog, is discovered in an alcove at the base of the Tondo di Capodimonte staircase in Naples, Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte is on the case. It is 1930, and Naples is preparing for the imminent arrival of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s ruler. It would not do for Naples to appear to be anything other than the perfect fascist city – a city with no crime – when Il Duce (pejoratively referred to here as “Thunder Jaw”) makes his appearance, and the powers in charge of security want no complications.  Commissario Ricciardi, investigating this case, possesses a kind of extrasensory perception regarding death. If he appears at the location of a violent death and has a moment to communicate with the body, he is able to hear the victim’s last cryptic thought.  By concentrating on possible hidden meanings revealed in this thought, he and Brigadier Maione, his only friend, gain important clues to understanding the victim’s last moment.  In this case, however, no ghostly image appears and no last words are discernable when Ricciardi communes with the boy’s body, and he does not understand why.

The fourth novel of the Inspector Ricciardi series by Maurizio de Giovanni, The Day of the Dead picks up all the continuing threads from the first three novels (I Will Have Vengeance, Blood Curse, and Everyone in Their Place) and draws them together. Ricciardi, now age thirty-one and the son of a Baron, is still living with his “Tata Rosa,” who has taken care of him since his mother died when he was a child.  His only real romantic attachment is to a young woman he admires from afar and who lives across the alleyway from his apartment. While Ricciardi is shyly working out how to contact this young woman named Enrica, Livia Vezzi, the widow of the world’s greatest tenor, whose murder Ricciardi solved in  I Will Have Vengeance, has moved to Naples and has set her cap for Ricciardi. In his professional life, his perennial difficulties with the authorities continue, primarily because he does not fear them or the loss of his job.

Staircase at the Tondo de Campodimonte, with the small alcove at the bottom left, where Tette’s body and his little dog are found.

This novel is different from the first three novels. Despite the often gruesome murders in those books, De Giovanni’s dry humor has always provided a kind of playfulness, almost a “literary wink,” to keep the reader of those novels intrigued (and sometimes amused), rather than repelled by the often hideous crimes. Here, from the outset, however, the author creates the darkest of moods, with no humor, using the pathos of the death of a tiny orphan boy, protected by his only friend, a small dog, to create a constant pull on the reader’s heartstrings. The orphan, Matteo Diotallevi, called “Tette” because he stutters and stammers so badly that he cannot say his own name, is one of thousands, “maybe hundreds of thousands,” of homeless street children in Naples in the early 1930s – children running shoeless, hungry, and without warm clothing in winter’s rains and sleet. Some, like Tette, are provided with a place to sleep at night, in this case a back room at a church, which offers shelter for six boys, but no love; little, if any, food (which the older bullies steal from the younger boys); and even less preparation for adult life. Some of the priests who are in charge of these facilities are less than scrupulous about their record-keeping and their own involvement with their charges. The children have no escape.

Santa Maria del Soccorso, where Don Antonio runs the church and the orphans’ dormitory. The name of the church is ironic. “Soccorso” means ‘”aid, relief, help.”

With starving children as the controlling idea of the plot, there is no relief for the reader from the overwhelming sadness in the lives of these children.  As details of Tette’s life emerge, the novel resembles an opera far more than classic noir. Some of the subplots further increase the dark sentimentality by illustrating the lives of the elite (including the clergy) and the contrasts they offer to the lives of the children. Livia Vezzi, the wealthy widow of the world’s greatest tenor, is angling for the romantic attentions of Ricciardi, and she is now planning an elaborate party for her friend Edda Mussolini Ciano, newly married daughter of Il Duce. Her elegant lifestyle, like that of the rest of the aristocracy, combines with her lack of interest in the lower classes to emphasize the gap between the rich and poor.

Edda Mussolini Ciano and her husband Count Galeazzo Ciano were expected to attend a party given by Livia Vezzi in 1930.  Ciano was executed by his father-in-law in 1944.

The connivance of some of the clergy with the fascists, and the clergy’s blatant use of the curia to warn off investigators who might uncover some unsavory misdeeds also become issues.  Even Ricciardi, in private life a baron with a large estate, does little in the way of action to help improve the lot of the poor, despite his stated empathy and the fact that Tette’s little dog, an obvious symbol, follows Ricciardi everywhere. The author provides additional insights into the personal life of Tette through a series of ten flashbacks leading up to his death, a technique which further conveys the horrors the child has lived through from his point of view.

Benito Mussolini, ruler of Italy in 1930, sometimes nicknamed “Thunder Jaw.”

Maurizio de Giovanni, a young writer whose descriptive talents develop more fully in this novel, with its memorable details about the coldness of winter’s approach and its psychological effects on the inhabitants, matches the moods of his novels to the seasons in which they take place. This novel, taking place in autumn, emphasizes change and the death of summer’s bounty, leading to the coldness of winter, a symbol which readers of this novel  will not be able to ignore: The devastating conclusion comes like a blast of Arctic air, and it is virtually guaranteed to shock long-time fans of the first three novels.

ALSO by de Giovanni (Inspector Ricciardi series):  I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE (#1),     BLOOD CURSE (#2),     EVERYONE IN THEIR PLACE (#3),      BY MY HAND (#5),    VIPER (#6),     THE BOTTOM OF YOUR HEART (#7)    GLASS SOULS: MOTHS FOR COMMISSARIO RICCIARDI (#8),     NAMELESS SERENADE (#9),

Inspector Lojacono series:    THE CROCODILE (#1),     THE BASTARDS OF PIZZOFALCONE (#2),       DARKNESS FOR BASTARDS OF PIZZOFALCONE (#3),     COLD FOR THE BASTARDS OF PIZZOFALCONE (#4),     PUPPIES (#5)

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://favoritethings.it

The staircase at the Tondo de Capodimonte, with the alcove hiding the body of little Tette and his dog, is from http://www.scaledinapoli.com/

Santa Maria del Soccorso, which means “Saint Mary of Aid, Relief, Help,” the place where Don Antonio was priest and head of the dormitory where the orphans lived, may be found at http://www.naplesldm.com

Edda Mussolini Ciano and her husband Count Galeazzo Ciano, in happier days, planned to attend the party given by Livia Vezzi.  He was eventually executed by Mussolini, his father-in-law: http://dingeengoete.blogspot.com/

Benito Mussolini, “Thunder Jaw,” is shown on http://leavingcerthistory.net/

ARC:  Europa Editions

“She started frequenting cemeteries that summer, preferring the ones others rarely visited. She could go straight from social events with white wine, canapés, and peripheral acquaintances, cycle to the nearest cemetery, and find the corner where no one ever really went….There was nothing secretive about it….it felt nice to let her thoughts sink into the earth where one day [she] would lie.”—from “She Frequented Cemeteries.”

Strange and twisted characters, the vivid but often sinister lives they inhabit in their imaginations, and their almost universal preoccupation with death make this collection of short stories compelling, even mesmerizing, despite the sense of menace lurking within each story. The characters all appear on the surface to be “just like us,” ordinary people with similar sensibilities and familiar goals for the future, but as they develop during the fifteen unusually short stories in this collection, Danish author Dorthe Nors slowly and subtly reveals how off-kilter they really are. Virtually all these characters are lonely and unloved, craving companionship, if not a lover, and they depend on their imaginations to provide the excitement which is missing from their real lives. Most them, however, do not recognize that there is a fine line between their harmless daydreams and the nightmarish visions which sometimes threaten their equilibrium and control their actions.

Photo by Flemming Jeppesen.

While the characters’ inner lives are unfolding within their stories, ordinary, “normal” life is continuing “outside.” People still watch the news on TV and stay up late playing games and doing research on their computers. Characters go to their jobs, some profess to follow the tenets of recognized religions, and they all reflect on their childhoods and early lives. Children move between parents’ houses during times of divorce, pets live and die, and the characters either grow and follow their dreams or become sidetracked by their inner torments. Even murder becomes a “normal” outgrowth of life for some of these characters, since they believe that they have reasons to explain away their behavior. Every story is filled with ironies, and even in the midst of horror, come moments of dark humor.

Munsterlander hunting dog, from “Mutual Destruction.”

In the title story, “Karate Chop,” the main character, Annelise, works with children who have psychological problems and learning difficulties, and as she reflects on her own life, she does so from a psychological perspective. As she is analyzing her inner life, the reader is analyzing her behavior, recognizing how far she is from knowing who she is and how much she is manipulated by her lover. “Any individual you happened to meet was nothing but a potential,” she asserts, explaining her philosophy, “an outline to be colored in and assigned content…The [outline] could never be lifelike, and for that reason you reached a point where you began to [color] outside the lines,” as one does with a children’s coloring book. Just how far one character can go in “coloring outside the lines” becomes the main plot of most of these stories.

“The Buddhist” drives around Copenhagen in a red Citroen Berlingo, thought to be the safest car on the road.

In “Mutual Destruction,” Henrik, the speaker, enjoys hunting with his small munsterlander dog, disliking the dachshunds that his friend Morten uses. In the course of the story, Henrik compares himself with Morten, and their wives with each other. Eventually, they agree that each friend will shoot the other’s dog for him if the dog is at the end of its life. It soon becomes clear that this friendship is strange, foreshadowing a future that is even stranger. In “The Buddhist,” a speech writer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs writes an article for a national newspaper in which he reveals all the lies spoken by the foreign minister. The Buddhist ends up working for an aid organization, a job he gets based on his own lies. Irony piles upon irony here, as the Buddhist drives around Copenhagen in his red Berlingo car, believing, grandiosely, that his car, the safest car on the road, is itself a sign from the Universe. As he drives, he sees omens in the sky. Four months later, this “Buddhist maverick” faces a crisis.

The real-life “Heron Man” who feeds the herons in Frederiksberg Gardens, from the story “The Heron.” Photo by RTCPH

“Female Killers” describes the inner life of a man bored with his marriage who stays up after his wife goes to sleep, playing backgammon on-line and researching the stories of female mass murderers. Of the famous Aileen Wuornos, who received six life sentences, one for each of the men she was proven to have killed, he concludes that “she was the kind of person you could have had fun with in a bar when you were young if the chance came around.” He also looks up Dagmar Overbye who was sentenced for killing eight infants of the 25 infants who disappeared in her care. “The abnormal can be accepted,” he decides, “it can even open doors in a person and make room for everyone to be human…But then it might be something else altogether,” he adds casually. In “The Heron,” a tale of abject loneliness, a man walks around Damhus Pond in Frederiksberg Gardens, thinking about bodies cut up and thrown into the pond and about the malnourished, tame herons which some love but which repel him.

Shipmaster Cottage in Sonderho on the Wadden Sea, which a boy and his actress mother occupied one summer in “The Wadden Sea.”

One of the most affecting stories is “Nat Newsom,” the story of a man “genetically predisposed to naivete,” a man who is a “toddler” inside. He stands outside McDonald’s every day opening and closing the door for customers, collecting enough money to buy a Happy Meal for dinner, and helping everyone. A scientist is taking notes on Nat Newsom’s life, and the contrast between Nat and the scientist provides some of the biggest ironies in this entire collection. The black humor here is as dark as it gets. In “The Wadden Sea,” the final story, a depressed actress takes her young son to stay with her in a thatched fisherman’s cottage on the Wadden Sea, for a vacation, as part of her search for an “authentic life.”

Dorthe Nors writes in a compressed style in which each story becomes the equivalent of an outline in a children’s coloring book for which the reader sometimes has to color “outside the lines” before the story takes full shape. Some of the stories are dramatic, some are extremely sad, some are mystifying, and some genuinely touch the heartstrings. All, however, are filled with ironies (and occasionally humor) based on the ways that the reader fills in the blanks to draw his/her own conclusions. The stories are unique in my experience, not just in style but in the unusual ways in which the author sees the big issues regarding life, death, growing up, and our relationships with the outside world. They are unsettling, often disturbing, and absolutely haunting.

ALSO by Dorthe Nors:  MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Flemming Jeppesen appears on her website:  http://www.dorthenors.dk/

A munsterlander dog, used for hunting in “Mutual Destruction,” may be found here:  http://www.free-pet-wallpapers.com/

The Citroen Berlingo, reputed to be the safest car on the road, is mentioned in “The Buddhist,” and is found on  http://www.speedace.info

RTCPH, a photographer with a series of dramatic photos of the “Heron Man” at Frederiksberg Gardens, mentioned in the story “The Heron,” may be found at his blog, here: http://rtcph.wordpress.com

A shipmaster cottage in Sonderho on the Wadden Sea, where a boy and his actress mother vacation, is from http://www.lancewadplan.org/

ARC:  Graywolf Press

Note: This book was WINNER  of the Irish Book Awards “Best Book of the Year” for 2012 and WINNER of the Guardian Award for Best Debut Novel.  It was SHORTLISTED  for the IMPAC Dublin Award in 2014.

“There’s a red metal heart in the centre of the low front gate, skewered on a rotating hinge.  It’s flaking now; the red is nearly gone.  It needs to be scraped and sanded and painted and oiled.  It still spins in the wind, though.  I can hear it creak, creak, creak as I walk away.  A flaking, creaking, spinning heart.”—Bobby Mahon, commenting on the heart on his father’s gate.

Though he is one of the best-liked and most admired young men in the small rural village in which he lives, Bobby Mahon hates his father, and the feeling appears to be mutual.  Still, he visits him every day at his cottage just beyond the weir – “to see is he dead and every day he lets me down…He stays alive to spite me.”   Bobby fears that his father will soon learn that Bobby, like the other employees of Pokey Burke, has been out of work for two months now, having lost everything in the financial troubles that hit Ireland after the economic “bubble” collapsed in 2007.  To make things even worse, Pokey has absconded with all the funds that his employees had contributed for their pensions, and Bobby believes that “if [my father] ever finds out how Pokey Burke shafted me, he’ll surely make a full recovery.  Pokey could apply to be beatified then having had a miracle ascribed to him.”  In the meantime, Bobby dreams of killing his father: “It wouldn’t be murder anyway, just putting the skids under nature.  It’s only badness that sustains him.”

Using Bobby Mahon as the central character around whom most of the action revolves, debut novelist Donal Ryan writes a dramatic and affecting experimental novel in which the story and its symbols, such as the “spinning heart” on his father’s gate, evolve through the points of view of twenty-one different characters, all of them living in the same town, knowing the same people, and contributing to the network of rumors and innuendos as members of “the Teapot Taliban,” as one character calls them. The father of Pokey Burke describes his two sons – Eamonn, his first son, whom he loves more than his second son, Pokey, whom he has spoiled over the years to make up for his lack of affection for him.  Pokey’s father, Josie,  now blames himself, in part, for the economic problems now affecting so many families in the village.

Red metal heart used as a gate-weight.

The village’s young men, in particular, have especially serious problems during the recession, since they often feel that their efforts have been betrayed and their manhood has been compromised.  One of them thinks of himself as a loser, and he admires Bobby Mahon because Bobby is one of the few who never made fun of him and who helped him get a job, now lost to the economy. Another tells of his decision to leave for Australia, where he will try to find work.  Yet another, a hypochondriac and schizophrenic, lives a life in his imagination and talks about his “reveries.”

Among the women are Lily, who has slept with half the town, but who has somehow managed to put her son through college.  Realtin, a woman whose small son Dylan becomes a major character in the action, reveals the effects of the recession on building projects, the one where she lives now housing only two people in the entire estate of forty-four houses.  Bridie Connors, a bitter woman who has lost her son in a fishing accident, reveals how evil Bobby’s father has been, at the same time that she also reveals rumors about Bobby’s own unfaithfulness.  A daycare owner has hired a male Montessori teacher to work for her, and she has now taken advantage of a program which provides free childcare for a year to parents whose children are of pre-school age.  Her business has taken off, though she does not meet the requirements regarding the appropriate teacher-child ratio.  Even an observant little girl  has a chance to say how her parents have been fighting because her father is out of work and her mother does not get enough hours working at Tesco’s.

Lough Derg, Tipperary home of the author as a child. Photo by Ludraman.

The breezy, casual, and sometimes highly confidential stories the characters share with the reader range from darkly humorous to frightening, reflecting the uncertainties of life itself and the often dominating role played by the church and by the characters’ unresolved issues regarding sex.  Homosexuality and lesbian relationships are also revealed during the characters’ inner soliloquies. The murder of one person and the kidnapping of another, while initially shocking, develop inexorably from the psychic melange the author has created for a narrative.   One character notes that there is also potential for even more violence in the town.  “It’s in the air, in the way people are moving around each other with grim faces and shining eyes, either all frantic activity or standing in tight groups, talking quietly and looking at the ground.  This must be how things were in the time of the war against the British, when a crowd outside of Mass would suddenly explode into a flying column, guns appearing from under overcoats, killers appearing from inside of ordinary people.”

Eyre Square, with flags representing the fourteen tribes of Galway. One of the characters considers this the best place for girl-watching..

Ultimately, the novel broadens in its scope from a look at the characters in a small village to larger considerations of how we all become who we are, the roles of parents, their goals for us, how they communicate with us, the lessons they teach (sometimes inadvertently), and the role of institutions within the community (church, school, work, and even the pub).  Author Donal Ryan’s sense of the telling detail, the revealing comment, and the inner dialogues we have with ourselves creates a memorable novel which shows from “the inside” how the very fabric of a rural community can be affected by unexpected acts of fate.

ALSO by Donal Ryan:  THE THING ABOUT DECEMBER

Killaloe, in the heart of “Brian Boru country.”

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears in http://www.tipperarystar.ie/

A red metal heart used as a gate-weight may be found on http://www.pinterest.com

Lough Derg, where the author grew up, is shown on http://en.wikipedia.org Photo by Ludraman.

Eyre Square, where the girl-watching entertained one of the characters, is found here:  http://www.imperialhotelgalway.ie/

Killaloe, in the heart of “Brian Boru country,” resembles many other rural communities along the Shannon and Lough Derg.  http://discoverkillaloe.ie/

ARC: Archipelago/Steerforth Press

“Don’t ever tell anybody about your bad dreams, people said.  Tell your dreams to a hole in the ground and spit three times.  They said similar things about good dreams.  Don’t share them with anybody.  Keep them to yourself.  So, I wondered, were the only dreams you ever heard the dreams that were neither good nor bad?” –The boy, Dshurukuwaa.

With a casual and natural curiosity about the mysteries of life, a young Tuvan boy from Mongolia muses about dreams in this quotation from The Blue Sky, clearly illustrating the aspects of this autobiographical novel which make it come alive so vibrantly for those of us who know nothing about his culture and are learning about it for the first time. Set in the 1940s, the novel recreates a time in which the old ways are the only ways for the Tuvan people, an isolated group of nomadic people living in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia on the Russian border. Using the point of view of Dshurukuwaa, the young Tuvan boy, the author tells a coming-of-age story which is clearly his personal story, as he observes the growth of the outside influences which are just beginning to affect his people.  The boy is very much a little boy, always acting “in the minute,” reacting to daily events with all the passion of a child, and the author, Galsan Tschinag, is able to communicate the boy’s feelings to a foreign audience in ways which make the Tuvan culture both understandable and unforgettable.

The author himself grew up in family of Tuvan herders – of sheep and sometimes yaks – living in collapsible yurts on the steppes and migrating to different locations as the family followed the seasons.  His life, however, changed dramatically while he was still a child.  The Russians occupied “his” lands, sending the author out of the steppes and into school, and later sending him to Leipzig, where he attended university and eventually received his doctorate.  “I have been a gatherer, hunter, and herder; a school boy, a university student and a professor; a trade union journalist [and] a shadow politician…” the author says. Today, in his seventies, and back in Mongolia, he continues, “I am the chieftain of a tribe, a healer, an author [who writes in German], a father, and a grandfather,” and he can still slaughter and skin sheep, set up and take down a yurt, milk goats, and birth cows.    The Blue Sky (2006, in English), the first of a trilogy about his life, is succeeded by The Gray Earth (2010) and The White Mountain, scheduled for publication later this year.  Through this trilogy, the author shows the changes in the author’s life from the most traditional aspects of his closed culture in the 1940s to the connected world of the twenty-first century, in which, he says in an afterword, “With my shaman’s whisk, a truncheon, or a laptop [!], I alternate between living in the indigenous culture of the post-Socialist Tuvans…and the enlightened state monopoly of Western Europe.”

Tuvan father and son. The children, of necessity, learn to ride on horses from a very early age.

In his book, Dshurukuwaa, a young child, spends much time alone or with his dog Arsylang, since his father is always working with the family’s herd of sheep, and occasionally yaks; his mother is gathering food and doing domestic chores; and his older sister and brother, about whom we learn almost nothing, are away at a boarding school to which they were sent by a government official.  Tied completely to nature and constantly moving with the seasons, the little boy and his family look for omens, and trust in Gok-Deeri, the god of the blue sky.  His life changes dramatically with the arrival of his grandmother, “the warming sun at the beginning of my life” (to whom the author dedicates this book).  An old woman with a shaved head, she is now alone, her husband having been killed by the Russians and her son killed by the Kazakhs.  Her recent stay with her sister in another ail has not been benign: “Piece by piece, Grandma’s yurt and flock wandered into [her sister’s] possession.”  She plans to reclaim her flock in the spring with the help of other family members so that she can give it to her grandson, to whom she now devotes the rest of her life.

A yurt in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia

When she leaves to get the flock, however, Dshurukuwaa has a terrible accident, for which his mother blames his grandmother, crying, “See?…It was the evil spirit that possessed your damn beasts and called for you!”  Though both his parents suffer for his disaster and pain, and his mother greatly regrets her rash comments, the boy feels most sorry for his grandmother:  “I will never fully grasp the agony Grandma had to bear.  Only a person who has suffered as much as Grandma can understand how horrific, how immeasurable and ineffable her pain was.”  The accident killed, for her, the “glimmer of hope that she might end her life among people who loved her, and that she might leave behind somebody on this earth who would remember her fondly and benefit from her efforts.”

Yaks and sheep grazing in late fall.

The grandmother’s stories and their lessons, the activities of their daily lives, the occasional amusements, and folk wisdom regarding healing and health all emerge in this story about this hard-working family which is totally responsible for all its own needs.  When Grandmother eventually becomes toothless, it is Dshurukuwaa who pre-chews her food for her, and when it is finally her time to leave the earth and “go home,” she tells her beloved grandson, enigmatically, “I will not get any older.  Rather, I will grow younger, ever younger, and smaller, until I am a baby again.  Once that has happened, I’ll hasten back to you.”

The contrasts between the boy’s family and the families of their relatives in other ails, whom they visit, show the unfortunate effects of outside influences – socialism, mandatory education, trade with the outside world, and the introduction of currency to business transactions, especially in transactions with the Russians, all of which change their traditional ways of thinking and acting.  Though his brother and sister return home to visit, bringing him his first taste of candy, the boy worries that they will have to leave again, and that “they will always have to leave again.”   His sister, for the first time, is afraid of the jumping of his dog, his closest “friend,” and he begins to think about what will become of his herd, inherited from his grandmother, if he has to leave. A terrible winter, the worst in memory, forces the boy and his family to deal with disasters they could not have foreseen as the book comes to its close (to be continued in The Gray Earth).  A stunning and important memoir, which memorializes a culture in the process of change.

ALSO by Galsan Tschinag: THE GRAY EARTH

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://en.wikipedia.org/

The Tuvan father and son on horseback are featured on http://mongolianaltai.uoregon.edu/

A yurt overlooking the Altai Mountains, originally uploaded by Adagio:  http://en.wikipedia.org

A yak and sheep grazing in the late fall are from http://www.csmonitor.com/

The map of the Altai areas, bordering Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and China may be found on   http://www.centralasiatravel.com/