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Loading... The Garden of Evening Mistsby Tan Twan Eng
  
Top Five Books of 2013 (131) Booker Prize (71) Top Five Books of 2014 (110) » 14 more  b.masonjudy | Apr 3, 2020 |  have too much to read right now...hope to get back to it later. I've read a bunch of dark,war/genocide/holocaust survival books recently. I need a few lighter reads....  Jandrew74 | May 26, 2019 | I listened to this book and found it difficult to follow. It moves back and forth in time and I often wasn't sure where in the story (time wise)I was listening. Maybe reading the hard copy would be easier. The story is based in World War II Japanese occupation of Malaysia. This part of history is interesting and the story uses the complexities well. I am still not sure how I feel about this story and will withhold ratings for now. (  ) yhgail | Feb 20, 2019 | Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling was the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner of war camp; everyone else, including her sister, was abused and raped and then killed, bodies put in a mass grave. After becoming a lawyer and then judge, she prosecuted the Japanese soldiers that could still be found in Kuala Lumpur. Now she is retiring, because of a creeping case of dementia and aphasia. Her story covers the time before the war, when she and her sister visited Japan and saw the gardens her sister fell in love with, but mostly settles after the war, when Yun Ling decides to have a Japanese garden created in memory of her sister. At the urging of Magnus Pratorius, a South African expat tea farmer, she meets Nakamura Aritomo, who was once Emperor Hirohito’s head gardener until he exiled himself. He refuses to take the commission, but says he will take Yun Ling on as an apprentice and she can learn through doing how to create a garden herself. Surprisingly, given her hatred for the Japanese, she accepts. She is to help develop Yugiri, the garden of the evening mists, the still point within a country roiling with guerilla violence. While there are some violent events, such as the guerilla rebellion that leaves many of the colonists dead, most of the story about small things. The learning of how to borrow scenery in a garden, the art of setting stone, learning archery. It is about Yun Ling and Aritomo’s developing relationship. Yun Ling’s narration is oddly flat; is this because of the aphasia? Does she have PTSD? The dialog is often stilted. The story moves very slowly; it’s very heavy on descriptions. It jumps around in time. Aritomo, the most important person in the story other than Yun Ling, never comes to life. It’s weird; the book was annoying in ways but also oddly compelling and very, very beautiful. I often thought “Will this story ever end?” but still could not even think about putting it down. Four stars. (  ) lauriebrown54 | Dec 22, 2018 | The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng is a beautifully written novel that the author wisely allows to unfold slowly as the main character comes to terms with her painful history and looks forward to her uncertain future. Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling has retired from the bench and returned to the Cameron Highlands. She reflects upon her personal history in a series of flashbacks and we slowly are made aware of the interesting relationship she had with Nakamura Aritomo, the Japanese gardener who came to the Malaysian highlands and built Yugiri, the garden of evening mists. When she first arrived in the Cameron Highlands it was 1951 and there was a great deal of turmoil and communist guerrilla activity in the area. She stays with friends at a large tea growing estate, but her mission is clear. She survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp and her beloved sister did not. Even hating all things Japanese, she wishes to hire the gardener to design a Japanese garden in her sister’s honor. Instead of agreeing, he in turn offers to teach her how to build the garden herself and for the next couple of years she works as his assistant and becomes his lover, and eventually his canvas. While the story was intriguing and wonderfully written, I found this book was a little to ponderous, the dialogue too structured, and the characters too reflective for me to totally embrace this story. I had previously read the author’s The Gift of Rain and found it far more accessible. The exotic setting and mystical aspects of the art and culture that the author built The Garden of Evening Mists around helped to make this both dark and atmospheric yet I was always very aware of how carefully the book was constructed. (  )1  DeltaQueen50 | Sep 9, 2018 |
 The language is as lush as the landscape he seeks to describe. His prose is punctuated with clever imagery; in reuniting with Teoh, Eng brilliantly describes Frederick's wry reaction "A smile skims across his face, capsizing an instant later." Though on the whole the descriptive narrative was attractive, at times more concision might have saved it from becoming overwrought, as in my view it was, and rather frustratingly holding back what was otherwise a compelling and unique story. As in his first novel, The Gift of Rain, Tan employs exotic settings and mystical aspects of Japanese culture to drive his narrative. But this time the effect is darker. Aritomo's mastery of the art of shakkei - "Borrowed Scenery" - initially seems enlightened, but as we come to question his true motives for absconding to this obscure backwater, it appears increasingly deceptive. Though later plot elements surrounding a search for buried wartime treasure do not always complement the atmosphere Tan has carefully constructed, this is a beautiful, dark and wistful exploration of loss and remembrance that, appropriately, will stay with you long after reading.  This novel ticks many boxes: its themes are serious, its historic grounding solid, its structure careful, its old-fashioned ornamentalism respectable. The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page: "for a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes"; "For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice." The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long: "We were like two moths around a candle, circling closer and closer to the flames, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first." Despite the dramatic events, the overall effect is one of surprising blandness, like something you've read before. This is a good old-fashioned story with a plot that arcs gracefully, maintains suspense, and stays true to characterisation. Yun Ling’s independent spirit and her anger seep like ink-stains into the narrative, but its distilled essence is a quieter appraisal of the dichotomy of memory, its treacherous failures, its cruel conveniences, its fadeout and deliverance. Outside Magnus’s house are two statues—one is of Mnemosyne the goddess of memory and the other is of her twin sister, the goddess of forgetting, whose name, of course, has been forgotten. Here, too, the garden is the conceit. “A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,” Yun Ling accuses Aritomo, “Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.” The garden that Yun Ling intends to make is about more than a desire to preserve the memory of her sister, though, for in many ways, it was the idea of this garden that kept the sisters hopeful through their long internment. The Japanese garden, with its many deceptions and beauties, becomes a well-formed metaphor for the ways in which our lives are lived.  Aritomo, the enigmatic former gardener to the Emperor of Japan who glides through Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, tells his female apprentice in the Cameron Highlands of early-1950s Malaya that “Every aspect of gardening is a form of deception”. Just the same applies, you might argue, to the art of fiction, with its incomplete points-of-view and deceptive trompe d’oeil vistas. Tan’s story here is just as elegantly planted as his Man Booker-long listed debut The Gift of Rain, and even more tantalisingly evocative. Suffused with a satisfying richness of colour and character, it still abounds in hidden passageways and occult corners. Mysteries and secrets persist. Tan dwells often on the borderline states, the in between areas, of Japanese art: the archer’s hiatus before the arrow speeds from the bow; the patch of skin that a master of the horimono tattoo will leave bare; or the “beautiful and sorrowful” moment “just as the last leaf is about to drop”.
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If you're interested in the state of Malaysia during WWII and Japanese gardening check this book out, otherwise move on. (