Tag Archives: Bhutan

Postcard from my bookshelf #7

July 15, 2017 By in Post-world, Postcards from my bookshelf Tags: , , , , , , 9 Comments

This project has international origins. It came from a comment on a blog I used to keep, where an American reader suggested I try an Australian novel: Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. This got me looking at my bookshelves with new eyes and made me realise how narrow my reading choices were. So in recognition of Australian literature’s role in opening my eyes to the world’s stories, I’m sending this month’s literary postcard to a reader in that nation.

Selecting one recipient from the clutch of very good entries from Down Under has not been easy. I liked all of the comments and had ideas of what I wanted to send to many of them, from JenroetheJourno, who is interested in LGBT fiction (try Nu Nu Yi’s Smile as They Bow, Jenroe), to Sharkell who likes not-too-heavy literary fiction and wanted to try some Arabic literature (it would have been Girls of Riyadh).

I was also intrigued to hear about the challenges of reading internationally in the outback – Bethany relies heavily on her e-reader as it takes around four weeks for many physical titles to reach her (Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad for you, Bethany). And I very much wanted to pick the brains of Alistair MW, a Latvian-Australian history teacher and Aboriginal education coordinator in Adelaide as I have yet to try Aboriginal literature and could do with some tips (my choice for you would have been Sandra Kalniete’s With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snow).

Unable to decide, I resorted to the time-honoured practice of picking a name out of a hat (or, in this case, my pocket). This yielded Ashlee Stewart, a 15-year-old Victorian who is keen to set out and read the world herself. Ashlee wrote this:

This is a great idea! I am thinking of doing my own version of this, but I won’t be able to fit it into just one year. I live in Victoria, Australia and I am 15 years old. I absolutely love reading. However, when I looked at my bookshelf, I saw a similar trend throughout my books, to what you saw when you looked at yours. I have now come to the conclusion, as you did, that I need to extend my range of reading.
To be given a copy of a translated book would be extremely helpful for this challenge, as the problem with spending money to buy all the books (as a lot won’t be available in my local libraries) is something that is playing on my mind.
Before starting this challenge I am writing a list of what books I will read for each country (which I am in the process of doing at the moment).
Also, do you have any tips or tricks that will help me with this challenge? Anything would be extremely helpful 🙂

Well, Ashlee. My main tips are to be persistent, curious and open-minded. Sometimes the route to finding those hard-to-reach titles can be surprising. Bear in mind that a lot has changed since I did my quest five years ago. Although some countries remain unrepresented in commercially available English translations, there have been some exciting new publications that have started to open up new literatures to us anglophone readers. I’ve featured some of them as my books of the month (the orange links on the List) but there are more out there, so I would encourage you to look widely.

It’s great that you’re getting organised and planning what you’d like to read, but I’d also leave the door open for changing your mind and discovering things along the way too. The more you do this sort of project, the more you learn about what’s going on with publishing around the world and you might find you stumble upon some more interesting choices as you go along.

As for my selection for you, I’ve decided to send you Kunzang Choden’s The Circle of Karma, to help you tick one of the smaller nations, Bhutan, off your list. The book is not a translation in the literal sense – it’s the first English-language novel written by a woman from the nation. However, in many senses it is a translation because it takes experiences that would be very alien to most Western readers and puts them into a form that we can appreciate.

Its central character has a lot in common with you. She’s also 15 and setting out on a quest – to travel to a remote village to light ritual butter lamps in her late mother’s memory. As I hope your reading adventure will for you, this journey opens up many ideas and possibilities for her, and leads her to a much richer life than she would have had if she had stayed in her familiar surroundings.

I hope you like it and good luck!

If you’d like a chance to receive a postcard from my bookshelf, visit the project post and leave a comment telling me a bit about you and what you like to read. The next recipient will be announced on August 15.

Bhutan: what goes around…

June 26, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

What people don’t tell you when you set out to read the world is that the research can take almost as many hours as the reading. Googling, emailing groups and individuals for recommendations, checking that suggestions meet the criteria, trying to decide which book to go for – it all takes time. So it’s always a joy when an expert on a particular country’s literature helps me out.

Ngawang at the Writers Association of Bhutan is one of these wonderful people. When I contacted the group through its blog, he sent me a list of five writers, together with four suggestions of titles. Of these, I chose The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden, partly because Ngawang described it as ‘one of the best books by a Bhutanese author’, but also because it is the first book by a Bhutanese woman published outside Bhutan, which makes it something of a milestone in South Asian literature. I was very excited when it arrived from India, vacuum-packed in cellophane.

The novel follows the life of Tsomo, a young girl from rural Bhutan who, not content to settle for a life of domestic drudgery, sets out to explore the world. Forced to be an outsider because of a mysterious illness that gives her a permanently distended belly, Tsomo works her way into northern India, drawn by the friendships she makes, a growing fascination with the Buddhist masters and communities that thrive in the Himalayan foothills, and a desire for peace.

The raw deal facing women in rural South Asian society is a major theme. Right from the opening chapters – in which the young Tsomo, unable to convince her father to educate her alongside her brothers, decides that being born a woman must be a punishment for bad karma from previous lives – the book portrays a world in which misogyny, sexual abuse and injustice are daily realities.

Women are by no means passive victims, however. One of the strengths of the book is its portrayal of the series of exuberant and warm friendships Tsomo makes throughout her life with other women. Many of these relationships, such as her bond with Dechen Choki – a young woman Tsomo saves from being raped repeatedly by their supervisor when they are working as manual labourers – are founded on the women’s shared experience of adversity.

This salvaging of positives from suffering is one of the many Buddhist tenets woven through the book. With much of its narrative taking the form of parabolic episodes through which Tsomo learns truths about the world and herself, the novel almost reads like a manual for progression to enlightenment at points.

What makes it work is Choden’s gift for evocation, both of place and of experience. Her descriptions of the rugged spiritual terrain Tsomo covers in her quest for peace and her moments of ecstasy reminded me of other great religious works, such as Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, particularly in the passages concerning Tsomo’s pilgrimages to sacred sites such as Bodhgaya and Kathmandu:

‘Once there they looked for the Boudhanath chorten, the Great Stupa, the starting point for every Bhutanese pilgrim in Nepal. From the moment they arrived at the chorten, Tsomo felt its awesome presence everywhere. The eyes on the chorten seemed to look deep into her soul and she felt humbled and almost afraid. She felt she could not hide anything from those eyes and yet at the same time, she was drawn to them in a strange way.’

Now and then the narrative gets bogged down in explaining the many religious and social customs that fill the book. This no doubt owes something to Choden’s decision to write her novel in English – a sign that she intended her story to be read outside Bhutan by people who may not be familiar with the country’s culture. Occasionally passages on topics such as why formal marriage is not common in rural communities and the ritual of overfeeding guests can read more like anthropological essays than chapters in a novel.

Mostly, though, this is a fascinating and absorbing book. Reading it drew me into this little-known world even more profoundly than I suspect visiting a hundred Buddhist gompas in the Himalayas would. A rare treat.

The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden (Zubaan/Penguin India, 2005)