• Asia,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  Uncategorized

    The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese **** (of 4)

    In the fictional riverside town of Parambil, in Kerala, India, 12-year-old Big Ammachi is taken from her home at the beginning of the 20th century to marry a widower. The marriage goes well and Big Ammachi is a protagonist around whom many of the village’s 31 additional characters revolve. Big Ammachi lives into her 70s and through her we observe the integration of rural villagers into the development of modern Indian life.

    Additional stories include a century-long investigation into a mysterious genetic ailment that makes many male descendants of Big Ammachi’s clan fear water and suffer vertigo when their heads are submerged. There is a nearby leper colony whose inhabitants and doctors are fully lovable. A young female artist, Elsie, must fight sexism to practice her artistic gifts. A Scottish physician sent to work in Britain’s colony on the subcontinent serves as an intermediary between British exPats and Indians. The regional environment of canals, forests, tea plantations, rivers, and individual trees are also important characters.

    At times the 775-page book feels like it has no beginning, middle, or end. Though never tedious, it can be as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Still, Verghese, as he says in his afterword, has culled and retold the stories of his ancestors. He has done so in exquisite fashion.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  History,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  Mystery

    A Disappearance in Fiji *** (of 4)

    Sargent Akal Singh has been banished to desk duty in Fiji. The year is 1915 and Britain rules its colonies with guile, brutality, and economic mastery. Singh, the educated son of an Indian villager figures his one way out and upward is to become a policeman. Sikhs are respected by the British, and expected to fulfill that role. He is sent to Hong Kong, but after a professional misstep lands in Fiji.

    Befriended by a native Fijian on the police force and a compassionate English doctor, but overseen by a condescending British officer, Singh is sent to wrap up a case of a missing Indian “coolie” woman. Wealthy British plantation owners imported hundreds of indentured Indians to work sugarcane fields without pay. Living conditions for Indian laborers, we learn in great detail, are miserable, and British overseers mete out punishments and abuse without fear of accountability or retribution. A missing Indian woman should be meaningless, but Akal Singh, and his friends, are so conscientious and likable that we root for their success while learning about colonialism in very personal ways.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Psychology

    Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal *** (of 4)

    A group of Russian men have just been conscripted into the Army. They are on the trans-Siberian railroad crossing more than 8 time zones toward their first training facility in the frozen East. Twenty-year-old Aliocha expects to be hazed, have his genitals burned with cigarettes, made to lick toilets, and maybe raped when he arrives at training camp. Along the fever-dream of an unending train ride he decides to desert. He makes an ally in Helene a French woman twice his age. Helene is AWOL herself, running from a Russian man she loved in France, but after joining him in his own country, realizes she is suffocating.

    Helene speaks no Russian, Aliocha speaks no French and yet they communicate and together hide from from a vicious Russian commander anxious to locate his escaping conscript. The pair are confined inside a train for hours and days until night and day blur. They are trapped inside their heads unable to make their fears and anxieties fully known because of a language barrier. Still, they work together. A novella that clicks along at 60 Km/hour, not too fast and not too slow. (A New York Times top 10 book for 2023.)

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Mystery

    Thief of Souls by Brian Klingborg *** (of 4)

    It would be a cozy murder mystery from which a lot could be learned about the culture of modern day China, if not for the fact that the female victim was not only sexually assaulted, but also eviscerated and sewn back together. The fact that harvested organs are for sale in China is part of the cultural education of Klingborg’s readers and worth knowing about as are the depths and origins of corruption in Chinese government. Under today’s communist regime, it seems almost anything is tolerated in exchange for so-called stability.

    Inspector Lu Fei stands apart from his peers in wanting to pursue justice and truth over convenience and a successful case file. In between drinks at the local bar in a small (by Chinese standards) backwater city, Lu Fei does what good detectives should do while keeping an open mind and collecting evidence. We observe him rub up against climbers, superior officers, and sycophants who show us rather accurately how Chinese police forces supported by a government sponsored justice system manage crime in China with a heavy hand and only a passing acknowledgement of due process.

    China does not feel like a place where rule of law can be counted upon to spare the falsely accused. Or a Uighur.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  Creative Non-Fiction,  History,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  NON FICTION,  Travel,  Uncategorized

    To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron *** (of 4)

    Mount Kailash in Tibet is a mountain revered and sanctified by Hindus and Muslims. Walking around its base cleanses the soul and brings respect and understanding to our dead ancestors. The mountain is reached from Nepal into Tibet, but is now monitored by China, intent upon Sino-fying the ancient kingdom of Tibet. Colin Thubron is one of Great Britain’s preeminent travel writers, barely a hare’s breadth away from nineteenth century British explorers, bedecked in pith helmets and khaki shorts, who preceded him.

    Thubron, already in his 70s, made his own pilgrimage immediately following the death of his mother, his last remaining relative and does so bathed in introspection. He pays exquisite attention to details noting interesting stones along a path made nearly entirely of stones. He shows us prayer flags worth looking at, discarded flashlights, exhausted acolytes crawling their way toward Nirvana, icy torrents, and armed Chinese soldiers anxiously hunting for protestors. He takes notes by the light of yak-butter lanterns and provides enough religious, spiritual, and political history to inform without overwhelming. He hikes to 18,000 feet in elevation meditating on his mother, who, like him, at the end, was gasping for oxygen, and his long-lost sister buried by an avalanche at the age of 21. Thubron’s adjectives cut like razors to the heart of every description. His account on life, death, and walking should be taken one step at a time, with concentration.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  Mystery,  Prize Winner

    Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips ** (of 4)

    Take my review with a grain of salt. Disappearing Earth was a National Book Award Finalist and top-10 book of the year for the New York Times. Its incomparable strength is its description of post-Soviet life on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the very far northeast of Russia. In the larger cities – the action takes place in and around Petropavlovsk – there are businesses, traffic, research centers, industry, hustle and hassle. Just beyond the outskirts lie unpaved roads, volcanoes, hot springs, reindeer herds, and indigenous villages caught between the past and present.

    In the opening scene, a pair of schoolgirls are abducted suggesting that subsequent chapters will reveal who took them and where they went. But, subsequent chapters overlap just a whisker, making the book feel more like a collection of short stories than a whodunnit. The protagonists of each chapter are women whose lives are miserable. They are sick, abandoned, abused, overworked, and lonely. I’m told the perpetrator is unveiled at the end in a village a dozen hours north of Petropavlovsk, but I was too depressed to get all the way through.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  History,  NON FICTION,  Prize Winner

    Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich *** (of 4)

    Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for her oral histories of Russia and the Soviet Union.  Secondhand Time includes exquisitely curated accounts of members of the Former Soviet Union beginning with old-timers that can still recall Stalin.  She speaks with citizens still longing for the stability Stalin’s rule ensured and intermingles enough survivors of the gulag to make clear that nothing was worth the bloodshed and destruction that accompanied Stalin’s tyranny. She continues with accounts from the post-Stalin era through the Yeltsin restoration of order and Gorbachev’s opening to capitalism.  Her interviewees make abundantly clear that replacing the communist ideal of equality for all with the frenzied shark attacks of capitalism has not been a smooth nor beneficial transition.  The oligarchs have profited beyond anyone’s wildest needs and the needy have been left to struggle to survive.  Young people that have never known anything but capitalism, according to their elders, worship materialism over community and mutual support.  Like many Russian pieces of literature, Secondhand Time is extensive and thorough, almost as if you were in kitchen after kitchen drinking Russian tea and then vodka deep into the night.  The final picture is masterful, with one caveat.  Alexievich never really describes her methods and there is some evidence that she has moved quotations from one speaker to another in different publications suggesting some of her books might be as much fiction as non-fiction.  That changes how you read her, I’m afraid.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  NON FICTION,  Psychology

    Without You There Is No Us by Suki Kim **** (of 4)

    sukiSuki Kim spent six months teaching English to the sons of elite North Koreans enrolled at Pyongyang University for Science and Technology (PUST), an evangelical college in the world’s most secretive nation.  Kim is neither a teacher nor a practicing Christian and yet maintained her cover despite being entrapped on the campus — there is no free travel in North Korea — and watched round the clock by North Korean minders.  What strikes Kim as most frightening is the total dependence of North Koreans on their Dear Leader who provides for jobs, food, beliefs about their past, their relations to others, and their future.  Free will has been utterly squashed.  Until she attends a Sunday morning prayer session with the Christians who run PUST and recognizes that entreaties of administrators and missionaries are virtually the same as what is broadcast on North Korean television.  She needs only to exchange the names of Kim Jong Il and Jesus.  She laments the inability of her college students to access the Internet, convinced that if only they could understand how much knowledge there is in the world each one of them would be free.  She wrote the book just two years before American Evangelicals, Fake News and post-truth politics cherry-picked from the Internet by his supporters led to the election of Donald Trump.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  Prize Winner,  Sixties

    Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson **** (of 4)

    treeofsmokeIn so many ways Tree of Smoke is easier to describe for what it really is not.  The setting is Vietnam, and to a lesser extent the Philippines, in the 1960s, but it is not a war novel.  The protagonist, Skip Sands, works for the CIA, but neither is Tree of Smoke a spy story.  Rather Johnson’s award winning novel is a detailed chronicle of a number of lives over the course of the 1960s told with page-turning drive and riveting attention to detail.  Every baguette served in Saigon tastes a little different from the last.  The temperature of the tea is hot on your tongue.  The swampy humidity makes your clothes stick to you and each character’s choices in life seem preordained.  A pair of down-and-out brothers from Arizona go off to fight in Vietnam and after being discharged continue to fight enemies within and without.  A Canadian missionary heals orphans when no one else will because her bible leaves her no alternative.  The Colonel is larger than life and for a time bigger than the army until he isn’t. . Uncertainty, like much of life, pervades.  America’s role in Southeast Asia is a perfect metaphor.

  • Asia,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  History,  Prize Winner

    The Incarnations by Susan Barker *** (of 4)

    the-incarnations-9781442387034_hrChina, despite its rocket launch into modernity, is still a country of five thousand years of history.  As Americans, a people that at best can only recall a couple of centuries, and let’s face it, have largely been a people focused on the future rather than the past, bearing that much history is hard for us to fathom.  The Incarnations injects life into China’s past by introducing us to a Beijing cab driver who carries within him the reincarnated lives of earlier Chinese who have survived imperial eunuchs, sadistic monarchs, invading Mongols, and Mao’s Red Guard.  Barker’s story-telling is creative, deeply researched, and luminous. She will make you think about the limitations imposed upon the bonds of love and friendship as they are tested over a millennium.