Book 239: Falkland Islands (English) – Little Black Lies (Sharon BOLTON)

The islands are transformed by the setting of the sun. As the colours fade to monochrome, as the fine contours of the landscape melt into shadow, so the sounds and scents and textures of the land wake up. People who live in the populated parts of the world talk about the quiet, the stillness, of night. Here, when the sparse population goes to its rest, the opposite happens. Here, night-time means an endless cacophony of noise. The nesting birds that Bee and I ride past chuckle and gossip, in a constant, squabbling carpet of sound. Overhead, avian teenagers carouse in high-pitched revelry, drunk on flight and freedom. Hawks sing, penguins on the nearby shore bray at the howling of the wind, while the clifftop albatross colony might be discussing politics, so varied and intelligent seem their conversations. Beneath it all is the endless grumble and roar of the ocean.

This one is a bit of a placeholder. Sharon Bolton isn’t from the Falkland Islands and I couldn’t find mention anywhere that she had even visited. (Though the descriptions ‘feel’ seem so realistic that that’s hard to believe). But since I was unable to find a single novel written by a Kelper – or by a long-term visitor – this one will have to do until one appears. And, frankly, this thriller is so good that I couldn’t pass it over.

The Falklands would appear in reality to be one of those island countries where everybody knows everybody (although there is a visiting cruise ship in this story to throw in a wild card); crime doesn’t happen and in fact nothing normally happens (apart from the little matter of the Argentine invasion and its legacies, such as PTSD and minefields). (“Margaret Thatcher, who’s practically become the patron saint of the islands after her handling of the invasion, talks about society being redundant, of the individual being king. If she truly knew and understood this place, she’d never spout such a load of old bollocks”). Indeed there’s no privacy even for the police – I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them!

When suddenly one child after another goes missing, even suspects have to get involved in the search. Three of the chief suspects are the prickly, troubled Catrin (who had already lost her own children), Rachel (the best friend from her childhood) and ex-soldier Callum, Catrin’s former lover – all of them flawed, are stalking each other, and all of them get to tell a third of the story from their point of view in turn. Whose version can you trust, if any of them? All of them have suffered losses, are damaged and suspicious, have darkness in their souls, and have secrets to be revealed. You can’t help wondering, if something like this happened to you, whether fate might tear you asunder from even your best friend as well.

The main characters are brilliantly drawn and believable (or should I say plausible), the setting is very atmospheric (a major character in itself), and the plot is not unbelievable but is fast and intricate and keeps you guessing right till the end.

For me the most devastating part was the pilot whale stranding, failed rescue and subsequent killing carried out by Catrin – even if in a good humanitarian cause, it showed that she was capable of killing!

The references to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to represent the unbearable burden that must be borne by Rachel for past actions that are sewn into the text were brilliant.

The ending is very clever and unexpected, although perhaps the author should have provided more information so that it would be possible to spot the miscreant ourselves (I was brought up on the Agatha Christie fair play rules!) Sour grapes since I didn’t guess the correct culprit, right? It also seemed a bit strange that Catrin and Callum hadn’t discussed the long-ago fate of their children Ned and Kit until the point in the story when they do. The pacing of the story was masterful. I totally recommend this one for thriller lovers, or anyone who’d like a quick trip to the Falklands.

Bolton, Sharon (1960 – ), Little Black Lies, London, Corgi, 2015, ISBN 978-0-552-16639-3

Book 232: Bermuda (English) – A Fall from Aloft (Brian BURLAND)

They were just passing out of the harbour now and there, not seventy-five yards away, was his uncle’s house – pink with a white roof. And there too was the dock and the bathhouses and the diving board. The tender was sucking up a great wave behind her as they entered Two Rock Passage – they always did, tenders and tugs and sometimes a big ship. James and his brothers and cousins would jump in and ride the waves; you could be lifted clear back onto the dock, the wave acting as a billowy elevator. The game then was to keep your feet on the slippery surface as the wave sucked down and away sometimes even exposing the harbour floor: white coral sand, black sea-puddings, purple ferns, brain stones and a few old pop bottles they should have dived up, before tea, last week. Afterwards his aunt always gave them iced tea – with mint leaves, from her garden, green against the yellow, itself smoky with sugar. It was delicious was iced tea with mint; he could remember the first time he’d tasted it.

For Bermuda I found only slim pickings. It came down to a choice between Peter Benchley’s The Deep, which I was sure would be a great read (if it is anything as good as Jaws), but while I’m sure Benchley must have visited Bermuda often, I couldn’t confirm if he had lived there; or A Fall from Aloft  by Brian Burland (an undoubted Bermudian, though the story doesn’t really spend any time on the island – but then again, The Deep no doubt spends most of its time at sea as well). In the end I chose the latter, and didn’t regret it.

I ended up acquiring another ex-library book, from Bolton Public Libraries in Massachusetts, US, as these second-hand books increasingly are. The title comes from a 13-year-old sailor’s tombstone from 1777 in Bermuda.

Although the protagonist of this story is a boy, it’s definitely not a junior fiction novel. Warning, adult themes!

In 1942, James Berkeley, who is 13 (or at least claims to be), is being sent by his estranged parents from Bermuda across the perilous, U-boat-infested Atlantic to England for boarding school. (I assume that a lot of this is autobiographical for Burland, who would have been the same age – the descriptions are so realistic that I don’t think it could have been written otherwise).

Little James can’t have been a very nice boy and his parents were no doubt relieved to have found a way of getting him out of their hair – he was always lying, stealing, bullying (especially Jews), lazy and a delinquent – and sexually precocious. But he has come to feel guilty about all of this, and by the time he sails off is convinced that he’s a bad person and a coward. The voyage becomes a literal ‘rite of passage’ for James.

Some readers might be offended by the vulgarity of the sailors’ speech – and the sexual descriptions. But these are not gratuitous but real. Burland also captures onomatopoeia of ship’s noises, such as the overrunning propeller out of the water, and the sailors’ argot, and ends with one in the refrain of ‘lost-at-sea, lost-at-sea’.

James is brave but haunted by quite reasonable fears – of drowning at sea after ‘falling from aloft’ (he has to perilously load blankets onto a lifeboat each time there is an attack threat), or from the ship being torpedoed – or maybe even the precarious pre-fab ‘Liberty ship’ just coming apart at the welds (there were no rivets). Burland perfectly captures the uncertainty and fear of the Atlantic convoy passengers and sailors. For secrecy’s sake, they don’t even know where they are, and have no real idea about when or where they might be attacked by the German submarines lurking like sea monsters beneath the waves. They’re also uncertain about what protection, if any, they have – is the destroyer escort still actually there? Burland’s description of life at sea is very realistic.

There is also the theme of class and race distinction – James is privileged and white, considered above the ‘blacks’ and seamen.

In the end, I felt that this forgotten gem might just be one of the best coming-of-age novels ever written. Another one that deserves to be read!

Burland, Brian (1931 – 2010), A Fall from Aloft, London, Barrie & Rockliff, the Cresset Press, 1968, SBN 214.66722.7

Book 205: St Lucia (English) – Death by Fire (Anderson REYNOLDS)

The year was 1938, the month was October, and it was the hurricane season. Prophets of doom riding horse-drawn carts with attached bells traversed the main roads passing through farming villages and all the streets of the towns lining the island’s coast, shouting their warning of an upcoming hurricane. The people should stock their houses with food, hammers, nails, candles and kerosine [sic] lamps. And those whose houses were suspect should consider seeking refuge in Roman Catholic Churches, then the largest and sturdiest buildings on the island.

In more eloquent voices, at every hour of the day, the radio repeated, in both English and Kwéyòl, the message of impending disaster. The warning cries of the prophets of doom and the eloquent voices on the radio were largely unnecessary. Even the tiniest creatures of the land could sense the danger. Nature had telecast its own mischief. For two days, dark, heavy clouds had blanketed the sun. The land had entered a perpetual predawn. The air was chilly, and, though rain was yet to fall, damp. The people could even smell the rain. 

 

Choosing a book for St Lucia was both easy and hard. It should be easy because the small Caribbean island country is blessed with one of the giants of world literature – Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. (Apparently this novel’s title comes from one of his poems). But he is a poet, and I needed a novel. The other top writers also seemed to be only poets. Finally I found Anderson Reynolds and chose Death by Fire. And yes, the St Lucians can write great novels too!

This beautiful island has repeatedly suffered tragedies, according to this novel, because the gods of the land were upset that the Carib Indians permitted the French colonialists to move the capital from Soufrière to Castries (then called Carènage!) That sounds like the ‘justification’ of a terrorist/warmonger/persecutor/religious bigot for killing innocent people, in ‘revenge’ for what their ancestors supposedly did a long time ago. But apart from that caveat, this is a fantastic novel!

It is an historical novel which jumps back and forward through time and between characters (in a much more successful way than most such attempts), with a bit of mythological history thrown in.

Reynolds, who knows what he is talking about, manages a deep analysis of the country’s problems through a few totally natural conversations.

The story-line follows two women. Unlucky Felina is left pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, and transfers her hatred at her fate to their son Robert

Beautiful Christine is also unlucky but is more resilient. She is a descendant of indentured Indian labourers on her mother’s side and a ‘Black/White’ mix on her father’s. Felina and Christine come from different worlds but their sons Robert and Trevor become great friends. Robert’s ‘devilment’ gets his friend Trevor into trouble (since Robert gives him the attention he never got from his mother). They end up committing a horrible crime. It all ends in the conflagration of the title.

I learnt a huge amount about St Lucian life and history from this one. The relations between the various ethnicities seemed very sad – everyone thinking they were better than everyone else. The Indian indentured servants (who were often, as here, tricked into coming out) and their descendants live lives little different from the (freed) slaves but still look down on them. The ‘Blacks’ in turn despise the Indians.

The novel is simply written but engrossing. I enjoyed it very much.

 

 

Reynolds, Anderson, Death by Fire, Vieux Fort/NY/London, Jako, 2001, 2018, ISBN 978-09704432-1-2

 

Book 194: Belize (English) – Beka Lamb (Zee EDGELL)

The rain, which quickly developed into a violent, whirling storm, started to fall at first with hardly any display at all. Then the howling wind whooshed inland, the lights went out, the radio went dead, and soon tons of rain deluged the town. Beka had not expected such a ferocious sound. The house shook and Beka was sure the wind would tear it right off its concrete foundation. Granny Ivy, Beka and her parents sat in the space between the boys’ bed and the bathroom wall. A single kerosene lamp burned on the floor and Beka kept her eyes fixed on that. There were about twenty-five people in the house, but everyone was absolutely quiet. Beka laid her head in her mother’s lap, listening to the lashing wind and rain. She meant only to drowse for a while, but the next thing she knew, Lilla was shaking her shoulder.

In 2000 I did a trip to all the countries in Central America, and I took the bus from Tikal in Guatemala to Belize City, and got straight onto a speedboat to Caye Caulker with the intention of letting my brand spanking new scuba licence loose on the Blue Hole. It would have been a good idea to catch up with the news first, for category 4 hurricane Pete was bearing down on the country and it was not a good idea to be heading to an atoll barely above sea level at the best of times. A couple of days later, after one of the two most frightening experiences of my life, I managed to get off the flattened island and back to Belize City. I thought everyone back home must be panicking as to whether I was safe. All communications were down, but the US embassy was amazingly kind and let me phone my mum back in Australia. No one at home had heard of the hurricane…

14-year-old Beka Lamb is a congenital liar. She even hopes for a hurricane to come, to wash away the school records and expunge her bad result (she had failed but lied to her parents about it.)

She is a budding politician and lying would seem to be good practice for that profession! To try to cure her, her mother gives her an exercise book in which she is to write any lie she feels like telling, rather than actually saying it. I hoped that her experiments with the truth could be turned into literary creation instead!

Anyone who has been to Belize City will probably remember its unique swing bridge. Beka has a dream in which she misses it opening and falls into the dirty river.

Her life is recounted in flashbacks (so I hope I’m not revealing too much of the plot) and punctuated by a series of incidents – little Belize is in a political ferment, about to become independent from the UK (Beka’s grandmother is a dyed in the wool supporter of the People’s Independence Party) and is threatened by Guatemala (which claims all of the country); THAT hurricane; and… what happened to her three years older best friend Toycie? (After getting pregnant she was expelled from their convent school and put in a mental asylum euphemistically called the “Sea Breeze Hotel”. But Belize had no “head doctors” unless one happened to be passing through. She dies soon afterwards. Did she throw herself off the bridge?)

There is also the theme of a multicultural society where each ethnicity seems to look down on the others (but still seems to get along with the others reasonably well), and of the struggle of the Catholic Church to gain dominance over the people’s more liberal values.

This was a quite nice coming-of-age story. It gave me a great sense of Belizean life and a particular moment in time. I’d love to find out more about the author – by the time this book was published, she had lived in Belize, Jamaica, Britain, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, the USA and Somalia! It was great to ‘revisit’ Belize. And maybe some day I will finally get to dive the Blue Hole…

Edgell, Zee (1940 – 2020), Beka Lamb (Caribbean Writers Series), London, Heinemann, 1982, ISBN 0-435-98844-1

Book 173: Equatorial Guinea (English) – By Night the Mountain Burns = Arde el monte de noche (Juan Tomás ÁVILA LAUREL)

 

No matter who the woman was, once she’d been discovered bathing on the beach she was judged to be connected to the Devil and became someone you had to avoid. She could no longer share anything with anyone, absolutely nothing at all. Of course it was possible some women were visited by that mysterious being at night and nobody ever found out. But it would have been unusual. It was more common for traces of the terrible heats to show up on their bodies. What’s more, it was common knowledge that after being visited by the being, the woman acquired powers she didn’t have before. And because the powers were connected to the Devil, they were powers she would use to evil ends. That’s why she was feared, and that’s why the governors ordered her confinement.

 

Like Hunger (Norway), By Night the Mountain Burns is the story of a country beset by the most grinding poverty (which has also now become extremely rich – in both cases due to the discovery of oil). It is set on isolated island in the Atlantic very like the one the author grew up on.

Equatorial Guinea is unique in Africa as being the only Spanish-speaking nation, and I would have read this one in Spanish if I hadn’t collected an English copy on my African book-buying foray in a Cape Town bookshop.

The story is set on a poor, isolated, traditional and unnamed island in the Atlantic (such as the one where the author grew up). It has few resources or supplies, and even fewer men (who have to work on the mainland, or were lost to fishing?) It is told in a quite convincing conversational style, with a unique voice, almost like an oral history project. The narrator is recording his childhood and seeing it through his childlike eyes. He grows up with his mysterious, uncommunicative, antisocial grandfather. The novel is replete with repetition of words and incidents – each time repeated with more details. Strangely, the first name doesn’t appear until halfway through the book – there are only three names, and lists of the dead.

Two sisters make a fire to fell a tree and end up burning the mountain of the title. There is also a devastating cholera epidemic. There must be ‘reasons’ for these disasters and they are sought and found in the occult. Life here is dominated by superstitions (or at least so we would consider them) and black magic. Despite their numerical superiority, the women suffer horribly because of them, especially those fingered as ‘she-devils’ (the menopausal aged).  One woman is horrifically beaten to death because she is supposedly a ‘she-devil’, accused of causing a man to fall from a tree. Everyone scared of the dark, but moonlight is even worse. Peeing not at the beach is considered suspicious. ‘Ministrants’ are considered even more powerful than the she-devils.

Considering how much of the local language and culture can’t be translated into Spanish, the book must have lost even more when translated into English, though the translation reads beautifully. I would love to see other books by this author, are they all this good?

 

ÁVILA LAUREL, Juan Tomás (1966 – ), By Night the Mountain Burns, translated by Jethro Soutar, London, And Other Stories, 2014, ISBN 978-1-908276-40-7

 

Book 172: Mauritius (French) – Paul et Virginie = Paul and Virginia (Bernadin de SAINT-PIERRE)

 

Every day was for these families a day of happiness and of peace. Neither envy nor ambition tormented them. They lacked nothing but the vain reputation that intrigue gives, and slander removes. It was sufficient for them to be their own witnesses and their own judges. On this island, where, as in all the European colonies, people are not curious except about malignant anecdotes, their virtues and even their names were unknown. Only when some passer-by asked some planter of the plain for the way to Pamplemousses: “Who lives up there in those “little houses”? they replied, without knowing them: “They’re good people.” In the same way violets, under spiny shrubs, send their soft perfumes far off, though they stay unseen.

[my translation]

Here I am discovering yet another of the world’s great forgotten classics. As I read, it reminded me of the movie Blue Lagoon in its portrayal of naive young love – and I didn’t realise until after finishing it that it actually was the film’s inspiration, but is much better. Bernadin was friends with Rousseau and obviously deeply in sympathy with the latter’s concept of the “noble savage”. It was published on the eve of the French Revolution and influenced a whole generation of writers – George Sand, Lamartine, Balzac and Flaubert. 

Paul’s and Virgine’s respective mothers have both taken refuge on Mauritius (then called Île de France), and the boy and girl grow up as children of nature. Their carefree youth is sunny, optimistic and unintellectual. They grow up in nature without any corrupting outside influences, in an ambiguous relationship of brother/sister, boyfriend/girlfriend, and eventually husband/wife. They consider Europe ‘barbarous’ because of the treatment their mothers had received (it is obvious throughout that Bernadin is preaching to the Europeans). Their life is described with many classical references; it may sometimes be a bit saccharine for some modern tastes, but of course it is a story of its time. (Along with other aspects, the owner-slave relationships seemed especially idealised.)

Sadly, both unspoiled children come to unhappy ends, victims of society. Their tragic ends are very moving. ‘Wise words’ lead to a logical conclusion but to sad consequences. Virgine ends up being killed by her modesty.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this lovely story hardly seems to be read any more.

Bernadin de ST PIERRE (1737-1814), Paul et Virginie, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1999, 2017 (first published 1788), ISBN 978-2-253-00729-6

Book 168: Bahrain (English) – Yummah (Sarah A. AL SHAFEI)

 

 

Dana was the one who killed me the most. She loved her freedom and liberty and had a very strong personality, very different than her quiet self when she was much younger. She wanted much more than what she had, and her ambition and enthusiasm always got her what she wanted. Even when her father left, she had chosen to look forwards rather to than [sic] think of the loss like the rest of us; “Baba wanted another life and so he went to look for it. I also want a better life and will prove to Baba some day that we were better off without him anyway,” she told me once. And maybe she was right.

 

At first I was a bit disappointed with Yummah. But I came to love it. The plot is not all that exciting – and in any case some spoilsport put effectively all of it into the back page blurb – and the writing is also not thrilling, or literary, which is not to say that there is anything wrong with it at all. But I had no problem keeping reading the story of Khadeeja and her family down through the generations.

As a 12-year-old, she is torn away from her doll and forced into an arranged marriage to a much older man. Her mother dies soon after, leaving her with two unknown brothers and a husband, though she does come to know and love the latter and have a happy life. She then comes to lose both a child and her husband, struggles to raise her huge family without him, and suffers more tragedies before the dénouement.

For me, it was heartbreaking to see her still speaking to her doll even when she has had nine children and two miscarriages, and when she has to sell her hair in order to pay for a hajj.

So, not the greatest novel ever written and I couldn’t help thinking, “not another novel about the unjust and/or hard life of Islamic women”, but well worth reading.

 

Al Shafei, Sarah A., Yummah, London, Athena Press, 2005, ISBN 1 84401 368 5

Book 166: Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese) – A última tragédia = The Ultimate Tragedy (Abdulai SILA)

 

Where exactly was this hope?

Those who knew her earlier would easily understand, it wouldn’t take many words. For the others, it would take patience to explain. She said that it went with her everywhere, ever. Sometimes, it even appeared in dreams, when she was about to fall asleep. It filled her heart with happiness and her head with ideas. New ideas and dreams, and others recussitated, that had been born in her adolescence and had died at some uncertain date in her youth. It was everywhere, even in Obem’s smile, which was also one of her [or: its] fruits. Hope was in everything she did, by day or by night, standing up or lying down. Anyone who didn’t want to believe it must be completely blind or very jealous. Or else someone who had never lost hope…

 

[my translation]

 

As Guinea-Bissau heads towards independence from Portugal, village girl Ndani nervously heads to Bissau to work for a Portuguese family as a maid. She is unlucky and seems not very intelligent; she starts with no knowledge of the world of the ‘brancos’ (’Whites’).

Like so many colonies, Guinea-Bissau ended up with colonists who were mostly poor fishers or peasants back home, and who hope the locals won’t know (the housemistress Linda can barely read).

Linda discovers religion and makes Ndani go to church. But her husband rapes house-girls.

Ndani is expelled and returns to her village; the chief force-marries her (his sixth wife), and builds a big house for her, but he abandons her when he finds she’s no longer a virgin. Régulo is also not very intelligent but does get good advice. The chief thinks about thinking all the time (the brancos’ secret) but he doesn’t really think.

She finally finds love with the school teacher and has a child with him. But all is not destined to end well, as he gets unwillingly caught up in the rivalry between Régulo and the colonial Administrator.

I learnt a lot about local attitudes, for example that ‘White’ medicine is thought to work on ‘Blacks’ but not vice versa… Another very enjoyable African novel.

This Portuguese language edition has a vocabulary full of great words (which the English translation apparently doesn’t have).

 

Sila, Abdulai (1958 – ), A última tragédia, Rio de Janeiro, Pallas, 2011, ISBN 978-85-347-0398-7

(First published in Guinea-Bissau 1995)

Translated as: The Ultimate Tragedy by Jethro Soutar, Sawtry, Dedalus, 2017

 

 

Book 154: Lithuania (English): Between Shades of Gray (Ruta SEPETYS)

My stomach burned with hunger and my head throbbed. I missed drawing on real paper and longed for light to sketch properly. I was sick of being so close to people. I felt their sour breath all over me, elbows and knees constantly in my back. Sometimes I had the urge to start pushing people away from me, but it was no use. We were like matchsticks in a small box.

I feel a special link with Lithuania since I was lucky to visit straight after its birth (or rather rebirth) in 1992. The visa stamp I’m most proud of is from Lithuania, numbered no. 75. (I suppose visa stamps aren’t much longer for this world – nor, maybe, physical passports, although that won’t allow us to travel as freely as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta…) Personally I’ll miss them, and the relieving thunk of the bureaucrat’s stamp into your little book (before which I always feel slightly nervous, as if I must have done something wrong…) Like my other most prized stamp, Liechtenstein, it couldn’t have been easier to escape from Vilnius station into newly minted Lithuania after the long train trip from Moscow (ultimately Tashkent), but finding the downtown office where I could get the sought-after stamp was not so easy. The country’s independence from the USSR (gained along with Latvia and Estonia in the amazing Singing Revolution) was still very tentative (the parliament building was ringed with defences against Soviet tanks which fortunately never arrived) and I was still shaking my head that they’d gotten away with it. And I felt myself privileged to have ‘discovered’ the lovely Baroque city of Vilnius and to be able to wander it with not a single other tourist.

Lithuania’s independence has always seemed precarious. In the Middle Ages in union with Poland it was one of the most powerful and advanced states in Europe. For most of its existence it has been swallowed by one or other of its neighbours. The Baltic States managed a fragile freedom between the World Wars, until betrayed and swallowed up by Stalin and Hitler. The USSR invaded, which is where this novel begins in 1941, and deported large segments of the population, especially the intelligentsia. The Vilkas family are put into freight cars and shipped to Siberia. The father has already been separated from them at the outset. The horrible journey is harrowingly described by 15-year-old budding artist Lina.

No matter what random cruelties are done to them (and Lina comes to realise that random cruelty is all of Stalin’s plan, hard as that is to grasp for humans who can’t help looking for patterns and reasons), the family and most of the Lithuanians maintain their dignity and morality. The NKVD (Stalin’s secret police, predecessor to the KGB and Putin’s FSB) is inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel to them, just as history has been to Lithuania. Not only must they survive against the vicious Russian guards, whose only vocabulary is “Davai!” (”Come on!” though it literally means, appropriately enough for Communists, “Give!”)

The exiles spend months at a labour camp in the Altai Mountains, then end up at an unbelievably bleak camp at the mouth of the Lena River on the Laptev Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. They are given nothing – not even food on days when they can’t work because of storms – and have to build everything themselves. The environment is so harsh that whether your door opens inwards or outwards becomes a matter of life and death. They have to struggle to stay positive in the face of not only the environment and the Russians but also one of their own (the ‘bald man’) who is unfailingly morbid and pessimistic.

Between Shades of Gray is an enthralling story, despite its simple writing. Few names are given, not only of the Russians but also of the Lithuanians, who instead are described (’the man who wound his watch’). It makes it easier to remember the characters, anyway. There are some beautiful images too, like the comparison of a dead person’s spirit to a kite disappearing into the sky. Despite the traumatising theme, I loved this book.

SEPETYS, Ruta (1967 – ), Between Shades of Gray, London, Penguin, 2011, ISBN 978-0-14-133588-9

Book 151: Mongolia (English) – The Blue Sky (Galsan TSCHINAG)

I felt as if the joy that had filled me when I saw Grandma for the first time had stayed inside me like some wave or like a breeze of light burning so intensely and radiantly that it blazed a bright trail through the time since I had last seen her. By now the river had become impassable since the cool of the night could no longer weld together for even a few hours the shards of ice that were breaking apart. The icy mass was like softened clay that sank beneath a horse’s hoof.

This is the story of a Mongolian shepherd boy (who shares the author’s name, Dschurukuwaa, along with much of the story) of the Tuvan nationality at the cusp of a changing world – in fact a very similar world to that of Abai, my Kazakh novel; both the traditional nomadic lifestyles and the creeping appearance of Communism are very similar. Most people don’t realise that Mongolia was the second country to become Communist (apart from the short-lived Béla Kun regime in Huntary); Marx and Engels surely never planned for Communism to be imposed on nomads, and collectivising and imposing quotas on those in thrall to the vagaries of the weather is crazy.

The Blue Sky is written through the eyes of a child, but unlike most stories like that, where the child’s adult self remembers more than is believable or has too much adult understanding in retrospect, this one worked for me.

Although his becoming a shaman (like the author) comes after this first volume, his feeling of closeness with nature is obvious here.

His relationship with his grandmother is lovely. During her tragic life, her wicked sister had stolen almost all her property. She finds consolation and happiness in looking after Dschurukuwaa.

As we follow him growing up, little Dschurukuwaa has a frightening accident, falling into simmering kettle of milk. The close relationship with his dog Arsylang, who can communicate with him, is lovely.

The most touching moment was the time of Dschut (violent weather), with its heartbreaking deaths of the animals.

The author is of the Tuvan ethnicity, a minority in Mongolia (though they have their own Tyva Republic in the Russian

Federation – it was briefly independent to 1921 to 1944 and some its unusual stamps are among my most treasured!)

This novel was first published in Germany in German, as were the two subsequent volumes, and the English translation uses German spellings which I think really should have been changed for the English translation; a less misleading English transliteration for dshele (rope tether in Tuvan) might be jele; for the Turkic title baj, we would use bai (or bay), and jolka (ёлка, Russian for Christmas tree) would be yolka.

In all, this is a beautiful little story of a boy growing up in a world which is also changing, even though not a great deal happens. The description of traditional life in the legendary Altai Mountains is wonderful.

Galsan Tschinag (in Tuvan: Irgit Schynykbajoglu Dshhurukuwaa) (early 1940s – ), The Blue Sky: a novel, translated from German by Katharina Rout, Minneapolis, Milkweed, 2006, ISBN 978-1-57131-064-4

(first published in German, 1994)

Book 144: Panama (Spanish) – Roberto por el buen camino = Roberto Down the Right Track (Rose Marie Tapia R.)

There was once a peasant’s donkey which fell into a well. The animal cried for hours, while the peasant tried to somehow rescue it. Then, the man decided that the donkey was already old; what’s more, the well was dry and needed to be covered somehow, so he decided not to get the donkey out. He invited all his neighbours to come and help him. Each grabbed a shovel and they began to throw earth into the well, one shovelful after the other.

The donkey realised what was happening and cried. Then, to everyone’s surprise, it calmed down after a few shovelfuls of earth. In the midst of its misfortune it had seen a glimmer of hope.

When the peasant, finally, looked down at the bottom of the well, he was surprised to see that with every shovelful that fell onto his back, the donkey shook itself and stepped up on the earth which was accumulating under its feet.

It was in this way that, very soon, to their great surprise they all saw the donkey getting higher and higher, until it made it to the mouth of the well. When there were only a few centimetres left, the little animal gave a graceful leap and trotted off towards the grass, to the admiration of the peasants, who thus received an unexpected master class.

[my translation]

That little story was actually my favourite part of this short novel! (My insincere apologies for sharing it here). For someone billed as Panama’s best-selling author, I found this book a bit disappointing. It’s the story of how the gangs recruit youths, and how Roberto (renamed from Tuti), with the help of the mother of one of his victims, escapes them and finds redemption. Which is great, of course. And I’m as much a sucker for a happy ending story as anyone. So what’s not to like? I suppose it came across as a little too goody-goody with a maybe too obvious preachy undertone.

Basically, the gangs take the under-aged because if they kill someone they only get a slap on the wrist from the law.

The story starts dramatically enough with a robbery, including a murder. Since the legal response is too weak, one of the victims’ parents goes with a bunch of assassins to wreak revenge on one of the perpetrators, but pauses when she sees he’s only a boy. The rest of the story consists of the rescue of Tuti/Roberto from his life of crime.

It reminded me of the Bible’s story of the Prodigal Son which – I’m sorry – has always troubled me. I get the message of forgiving those who have wronged you and giving them a chance for a new start, but why should they be favoured over those who have never sinned in the first place?

As a suggestion for helping those living in poverty, I think Luis Carlos’ idea of getting poor mothers sterilised will horrify many readers. I suppose that’s one way of stopping children getting into gangs, if they’re not even born…

Basically, I felt that the scenario was unrealistic (for example, that the gangs didn’t fight back), and I doubt that the legal situation would even permit what happened in the story.

The author is one of the best-selling authors of Panama. From this novella, I can’t really see why. It’s really a children’s book, with simple themes and language and healthy morality, and in that role would no doubt work well. I did enjoy the fact that the Spanish was easy to read!

TAPIA RODRIGUEZ, Rose Marie (1945 – ), Roberto por el buen camino, Mazon Edition (self-published), 2004, ISBN 978-9962-00-801-9Translated into English