Tag Archives: Tibet

Book of the month: Tsering Döndrup

April 30, 2026 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

‘I wonder if you’ve considered any books from Tibet so far,’ Chris Peacock wrote in a comment on this blog a few weeks back. ‘In recent years, there have been an increasing number of translations from so-called “minority” peoples and languages in China such as Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Still a small number, relatively speaking, but there are some really significant books out there. My translation of the novel The Red Wind Howls came out this year, by Tsering Döndrup, one of the most prominent authors in contemporary Tibet. He’s a wonderful writer, and very worth your time.’

I love getting recommendations like this. Although I often feel guilty about how few of them I am able to follow up, it is one of the great privileges of this project that experts and booklovers all over the world share details of intriguing stories that would never otherwise come to my notice.

Peacock’s suggestion arrived at a fortuitous moment. I have long been meaning to seek out some Tibetan literature, having become increasingly intrigued by stories from minority communities in mainland China since featuring Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, the extraordinary memoir by exiled Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman. In addition, I’d been really intrigued by the novel Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran, another recent Book of the month. If a depiction of the region by a Beijing-based Sinophone writer could capture my imagination so powerfully, how might a narrative by a native Tibetan compare?

When my copy arrived, I was shocked to learn from Peacock’s introduction of the toll the sharing of the novel has taken on its author since he self-published it in 2006. The authorities seized all his copies on the pretext the book did not have an ISBN and, after a Chinese translation was released in Hong Kong in 2012, Tsering Döndrup had his party membership revoked, his passport confiscated and his salary and pension reduced through demotion. What was it about this story that made its author face such punishment?

The Red Wind Howls is broken into two parts. The first focuses on the experiences of Alak Drong, a lapsed lama who is sent with many compatriots to be turned into a ‘labour machine’ as part of the atrocities that followed the 1958 uprising and during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, ‘a time turned upside down’ that saw widespread famine, tens of thousands of Tibetans killed and many villages reduced to women, children and the elderly. Part two centres on Lozang Gyatso and Tashi Lhamo, another former lama (although one who adheres to his vows) and a young woman who enters into a sham marriage with him for her protection.

The first thing that struck me was the voice. I suppose because of its importance, bravery and the weightiness of the subject matter, I had expected the novel to feel rather dense. It would be a necessary rather than an enjoyable experience, I anticipated – one of those books that I felt pleased to have read rather than savouring in the moment. Instead, what greeted me (and credit is due to Peacock too here) was a fresh, irreverent, surprising narrative that dodged between registers, often undercutting high-flown rhetoric with earthy retorts.

There is a wonderful directness to the writing that allows Tsering Döndrup to take readers to the heart of his characters’ problems in a handful of words. ‘Trying to cultivate the land at more than eleven thousand feet above sea level brought about as much benefit and did about as much damage as trying to graze your cattle in the ocean,’ he writes, succinctly demonstrating the lunacy of the centralised agricultural policies that ravaged his homeland. Elsewhere, in order to convey the full force of the horror that engulfed Alak Drong and his peers when they were transported to labour in a forest hundreds of miles from home, he writes: ‘For a free person, a forest might be a nice vacation spot, somewhere to get away from it all. But for someone deprived of their freedom it’s the very opposite: it feels like a prison cell.’ A deep humaneness underpins the writing, extending not only to the characters and the wronged people for whom they stand but also to the reader and how they might struggle to get to grips with this story.

Structurally, the book feels unusual, at least to an anglophone reader like me. There are no chapters – a deliberate choice, as the author makes clear when he tells us, midway through, that ‘If this novel were divided into chapters, then this would be the chapter about the Eight Cold Hells.’ The narrative is far from linear, swooping between current events, memories, the future, other life incarnations and flashbacks. Some aspects of this seemed familiar to me – I explored a similar approach (without the layering of reincarnation) with the traumatised character of Jonah in my second novel, Crossing Over, in an effort to reflect the way that deep suffering disorganises events and throws a person out of time.

With The Red Wind Howls this initially discombobulating approach ultimately had the effect of making the reading experience easier: it absolved me of the need to try to grip onto dates and places, struggling to keep straight the details of this unfamiliar history. Instead, I could give myself over to the immediacy of the experiences described without trying to fit them into a larger pattern or make sense of them – indeed, as Tsering Döndrup shows us, there is no making sense of what Tibet endured during this period.

Yet there are some sharp psychological insights to be gleaned from it. Tsering Döndrup’s satirical eye comes to the fore in skewering both the hypocrisy of many of the religious figures, who readily betray their followers for their own benefit, and the perpetual revisionism of the authority figures, who are forever rewriting history in order to make failures either a success or the fault of those who suffer the most from them. Heartrendingly, he shows us what becomes of people when all is stripped away and how easily any of us might give up our principles in the face of persecution.

But this is not a polemic or a morality tale. Tsering Döndrup is a highly nuanced writer and though there are elements of satire in this book, there is none of the black-and-white thinking that often flattens issue-led novels. No-one is entirely innocent in the way things unfold and Tsering Döndrup resists apportioning blame along purely ethnic lines. The world of his novel is messier and more troubling than that.

Nor is this a world devoid of hope. It is there in the deeds of the anonymous well-wisher who annually slaughters a sleep tethered outside Lozang Gyatso’s tent so that he can survive without breaking his vows. It is in the awkward love that grows between him and Tashi Lhamo. And it is in the secret cache of sacred texts stored in a secluded cave in the hope of better times, texts that ultimately transform Tashi Lhamo’s life.

It is perhaps particularly cruel that a story that places its hope in books should have caused its author so much suffering. To date, although Tsering Döndrup’s other works are available in Tibetan, The Red Wind Howls remains off-limits in his native language. By bringing it into English, Christopher Peacock has allowed this powerful voice to speak to the world’s largest cohort of readers (when you count second-language speakers). Thanks, Chris, for bringing it to my attention.

The Red Wind Howls by Tsering Döndrup, translated from the Tibetan by Christopher Peacock (Columbia University Press, 2025)

Book of the month: Ning Ken

September 25, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:

‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’

The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.

On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.

Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.

In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’

In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.

Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’

Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)

What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.

This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’

The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.

Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)

Liechtenstein: the long way round

August 24, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

Just after I’d finished reading this book, I had an email from a Liechtenstein publisher. ‘Now who recommended the Liechtenstein authors to you?!’ he wrote. ‘That’s embarrassing!’

I assume the reason for his embarrassment was that the only two authors with named books on the list were non-native residents of Liechtenstein – the German thriller writer CC Bergius and the Austrian explorer and mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, a controversial figure who joined the Nazi party shortly before the outbreak of the second world war. Yet, as I tried to explain in my response, there was method in the apparent madness of these suggestions, and it went something like this:

The search for a story from the tiny principality of Liechtenstein began with an email to a friend of a friend from the country, who suggested I contact an old teacher of hers who was involved with PEN-Club Liechtenstein. Sadly, the email address she gave me no longer seemed to work and my inquiries bounced straight back at me.

Time for plan B: I’d heard that a Liechtenstein author, Iren Nigg, had won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011. Perhaps some of her work would be available in English? I dropped her a line and she very kindly responded. She was sorry, but other than the extract of her work in the prize-giving booklet, nothing had been translated yet. She attached the extract in case it was suitable for the project, but if I was looking for a complete work in translation, she recommended I contact her friend writer Stefan Sprenger (there’s a great interview with him about Liechtenstein literature on the Dalkey Archive Press website).

I emailed Sprenger but it was the same story with him. Although he had had some isolated pieces translated, none of his books were available in English in their entirety. To his knowledge, the only Liechtensteiner who had had a whole book translated into English in recent years was Prince Hans Adam II  von und zu Liechtenstein. His political treatise, The State in the Third Millennium, would not count for my purposes unless, he joked wryly, I were willing to consider it as a horror story.

Failing that, Sprenger suggested emailing Dr Peter Gilgen, a Liechtenstein academic specialising in literature and philosophy at Cornell University in the US. If anyone would know of Liechtenstein work available in English Sprenger warranted Gilgen was the man.

Gilgen came back with a full and thoughtful reply. No book-length Liechtenstein prose translations came to mind but he did know of a prose-poem, The Gravel by Michael Donhauser, which was translated into English as a freestanding work some years ago. However, given that this was hard to find and not a prose work as such, he would like to suggest Bergius and Harrer, as both writers lived for many years in the principality. Indeed, Harrer, who claimed to be ashamed of his Nazi involvement in later life, was a member of PEN Liechtenstein and wrote his most famous work, Seven Years in Tibet, while living in the state.

And so it was, as I explained to my indignant correspondent, that I had included Bergius and Harrer on the list. However, if he could recommend another Liechtenstein work that I could read in English, I would be delighted to consider it.

Several weeks later, I have not heard anything further. And so, taking the risk that an email may be winging its way to me even now and hopeful that this post may winkle out some full-length Liechtenstein fiction for us Anglophone readers to enjoy, I am writing on Harrer’s memoir Seven Years in Tibet.

Given the tortuous route I’d taken to get to it, Harrer’s book about his attempt to make his way into the closed world of Inner Tibet felt like a rather appropriate read. Starting with his internment in and repeated escape attempts from an Indian prisoner of war camp at the outbreak of the second world war, the memoir charts Harrer’s flight into the country and his eventual arrival in the capital Lhasa, despite the best efforts of the Tibetan people, the hostile landscape and the occasional bear and leopard to stop him. Building a life in a society not thought to have been visited by Westerners before, Harrer and his companion Peter Aufschnaiter fell in love with the peaceful country and Harrer was even appointed to be a private film tutor to the young Dalai Lama, until the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1949 forced them to return to Europe.

Harrer’s matter-of-fact accounts of his feats of derring-do are the secret of the book’s success. Whether he’s enduring recapture by the British, outwitting a band of Tibetan Khampas (robbers)* on a lonely plain, or chasing a run-away yak in sub-zero temperatures, the writer remains stoic and restrained, observing after one disastrous episode with the Indian police, ‘we learned from this adventure a bitter but useful lesson’. Indeed, it’s impossible not to be impressed by his meticulous approach to each challenge and his dauntlessness in the face of countless setbacks. I found my fingers itching to write ‘stiff upper lip’ in the margins several times, before I remembered that this was not a British book and that the writer, had he been in Europe instead of South Asia during the years he describes, would most likely have been doing his best to make a number of stiff upper lips tremble.

Harrer’s insights into  Tibetan culture are, for the most part, fascinating. From polyandry among herders and the ‘burial’ practice of smashing a body up and leaving it out to be eaten by the birds, to the strange communication arrangements you have to make in a country that is not a member of the Universal Postal Union if you want to send a letter to the outside world, Harrer’s descriptions are engrossing and his love for the country is clear.

That said, the book is very much of its time – and of Harrer’s own prejudices. Sweeping and often patronising generalisations abound about Tibetans being ‘a happy little people full of childish humour’, their music having ‘no harmonies’, and their women, who ‘know nothing about equal rights and are happy as they are’.

But perhaps such a cast-iron belief in your own judgments and opinions is what it takes to be a pioneer. A more circumspect individual might have decided, on balance, that it was best to stay in the POW camp and wait out the war. I’m very glad he didn’t.

Seven Years in Tibet (Sieben Jahre in Tibet) by Heinrich Harrer, translated from the German by Richard Graves (Flamingo, 1994)

*As fellow literary explorer Bradley pointed out, while Harrer presents the Khampa people as robbers, they are in fact an ethnic group, so this is an unfair description.