On the journey “Around the World in 80 Books”, I have arrived in Japan on the way to Oceania.
ASIA
56: JAPAN
**** Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. Again, I am revisiting my real-life ATW journey, when I flew from San Francisco to Seoul, took the train to Busan, and crossed to Japan on the same boat by which Sunya and Erik arrive. Almost all the main characters are Korean living in Japan, and suffering discrimination on many levels. (Among the many insightful questions in the “Reading Group Guide”, this topic is almost completely avoided,) I would have given the book five stars but for an uneasiness about the character of Hansu, the “Yazuka” boss who fathers Sunya’s elder son – amoral villain, or someone who tries to use his enormous power for good? Again, the Reading Group Guide is silent on this.
OCEANIA
Another long sea crossing to
57: Papua New Guinea
***** Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip. The scene is an island in Papua New Guinea. Because of trouble between the “redskins” (soldiers) and “rebels” (young islanders), the teachers have left the island. The one remaining white man, Mr Watts, decides to reopen the village school, with just one text book: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. As 14-year-old Matilda and the other children listen to the story, they become enthralled at the possibility of another world to which they can escape in their imagination. After she leaves the island, Matilda realizes that neither Pip, nor Dickens, nor Mr Watts, was quite what they seemed.
58: Solomon Islands
**** Graeme Kent, Devil-Devil. The first of a series of detective stories starring Sergeant Ben Kella, a native of the island of Malaita, and Sister Conchita, an American nun. This one is set in 1960, as the Solomon Islands prepare for independence. Ben moves between the old (“custom”) way and the new, and Conchita learns that she needs to understand the islanders’ traditions in order to be effective in her mission. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
59: Australia
**** Jean Grainger, Sisters of the Southern Cross. Set in 1934, five Irish nuns arrive in a small town to run a convent school. Their patron, the Mayor, intended it for Irish Catholics only; Sister Claire, the headmistress, refuses to discriminate between God’s children. Details of the nuns’ lives are based on some recorded interviews discovered in a museum when the author was on an extended holiday in Australia.
BACK TO ASIA
60: Indonesia (Sumatra)
*** Corina Bomann, The Moonlit Garden. The story moves backwards and forwards between 1902 in Sumatra and 2011 in Berlin, when a stranger enters an antique shop and insists on giving the owner an unusual violin. She decides to discover its story. Half the solution is obvious early on, the other half depends on rather too many coincidences, and there is no explanation of why the owner should have inscribed a rose on the violin before the final varnish.
61: Malaysia
**** Selina Siak Chin Yoke, The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds Chye Hoon (based on the author’s great-grandmother) tells the story of her life. Born in a village in Siam in 1878, she grew up in the Nyonya culture – a mixture of Malay and Chinese, the “two worlds” of the title. The family moved to Malaya when she was a child, and she spent the rest of her life there, raising ten children and observing many changes. A fascinating portrayal of a changing world. The story continues after Chye Hoon’s death in 1941 in the sequel, When the Future Comes Too Soon.
62: Thailand
*** James King, Post it Notes. The title refers to the post-it notes on Alfie’s fridge at home in Cape Town. Increasingly fed up with life in South Africa, he is contemplating a move to Thailand. A promising scenario; but when he gets there, he spends most of the time in tourist hotels in Phuket and business meetings in Bangkok, neither of which offers the lifestyle he craves. Will his dream of building a house with his Thai girlfriend in her parents’ remote village be any more successful? I am not sufficiently interested in the characters to read the sequel.
63: Burma
**** Rosalind Russell, Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times. Burma from 2007 to 2014 through the eyes of ordinary and extraordinary people, as told to a journalist operating under and after censorship. Rosalind Russell lived in Rangoon from 2008 to 2010 when her husband was working for a relief agency. Interviewees include Aung San Suu Kyi on her release for house arrest, editor of the first free magazine, a monk and a Muslim leader of neighbourhood watch groups, a king’s grandson and a punk rocker – and the children’s nanny, a refugee in Thailand who finally plans to return to her town.
64: Bangladesh
**** Helena Thorfinn, Before the River Takes Us. An excellent account of life in Bangladesh and some of the problems of development aid, drawing on the author’s experience working at the Swedish Embassy in Dhaka. The environments and the questions are real; the characters, including the Swedish Ambassador whose main interest is in linguistics, are fictitious.
65: India
**** David Charles Manners, In the Shadow of Crows. Having read the first six chapters some years ago, I restarted at chapter 1 and missed the preliminary material, I didn’t realize until near the end that this was a true story. David, a grieving young widower, travels to India in search of his family roots as an attempt to put his life together. His journey alternates with that of Bindra, also widowed, who is cast out of her village and travels with her two young sons in search of refuge and medical treatment for leprosy. Half way through, their paths cross in Varanasi, bringing back memories of my visit there in 2017. They do not meet again until near the end of her life. Bindra’s story, based on her memories, is shot through with her remarkable spirituality.
66: Pakistan
***** Soniah Kamal, Unmarriageable. A retelling of Pride and Prejudice, following the life of the five Binat sisters in a small town in Pakistan at the turn of the millennium. Excellent if, like me, you read the original too young to apprecate Austen’s social comment – and lots of information about fashions, foods, and cultural influences of the time and place.
ASIA/ MIDDLE EAST
67: Iran
**** Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Not the well-known translation by Edward Fitzgerald (so I may be showing the wrong cover), but a 1967 translation by Robert Graves, with critical commentaries by the translator and Omar Ali-Shah placing Khayyam in the context of Sufi mystical verse. The wine is allegorical; Graves quotes analogies from the Song of Songs in Hebrew and Christian scriptures. To me, the underlying philosophy is closer to Ecclesiastes. Well worth reading.
ASIA/MIDDLE EAST
68: Iraq
**** Judit Neurink, The Jewish Bride: Iraq’s lost past. Parallel stories of two young women. When her old house is being demolished, Zara finds Rahila’s diary from the 1940s buried under the floorboards, and becomes obsessed by her story. The two girls have more in common than she thinks. the story is set in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the diary covers the founding of the state of Israel, where Rahila was not ready to follow her fiance. The author was born in the Netherlands, has worked as a journalist in Iraq, and now lives in Athens.
ASIA/MIDDLE EAST/EUROPE
69: Turkey
*** Barbara Nadel, Incorruptible. The twentieth book of a series about police officers in Istanbul. I think I read one or two of the earlier ones in the old days when I borrowed thrillers from my public library. An ingenious plot and some interesting characters. Like many of the books I have read recently, it highlights the ethnic and religious diversity of the setting.
Now I am back in Europe, the story continues in the folder ATW1.
emeritablog: life after work 