The Blue Sky

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      By Galsan Tschinag. Translated by Katharina Rout. Oolichan Books, 209 pp, $24.95, hardcover.

      Mongolia. The word conjures up a place that seems faraway and mysterious. In The Blue Sky, Galsan Tschinag's fictionalized childhood memoir, life in Mongolia is both foreign and familiar.

      The young narrator and his family are Tuvans, a traditionally nomadic ethnic group. The narrator lives with his parents, older siblings, and grandmother in their yurt. Life is filled with the grinding labour of living off the land; even the children work.

      Told in the first person, the book draws readers into the particulars of the traditional Tuvan way of life: “...as soon as it was able to move on its own and until it could tell danger from no-danger, [a child] was tethered with a rope to the head of its parents' bed. This way the child was protected from the many dangers it could get into.” 

      The Blue Sky allows readers to look at seemingly mundane aspects of life through new eyes: “Money, the colorful square pieces of paper, represented something valuable....The pieces of paper one got for a boisterous flock of sheep or herd of yaks did not even fill a hand, and one by one turned into flour, rice, salt, tea bricks, candles, lead, gun powder, primer, and other stuff.” 

      The spectre of communism presses in on the narrator's life. Siblings and cousins are taken away to state school, and he senses that eventually the time will come to leave the only life he knows.

      Written in German and published in Germany a decade ago as the first book in a trilogy, this is the first of Galsan Tschinag's numerous works to be translated into English. The writing and the translation are both skilled—the book is poetic, touching, and enjoyable. Tschinag succeeds in conveying universal aspects of the human experience, along with the specifics of Tuvan life and of life inside a single human family.

      Galsan Tschinag appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival next Saturday (October 21) at 8 p.m. at Performance Works and next Sunday (October 22) at 1:30 p.m. at the PTC Studio. He also lectures at UBC's Institute of Asian Research next Wednesday (October 25) at 4:30 p.m. For info, visit www.iar.ubc.ca/.

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