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Loading... The Last Quarter of the Moon (original 2013; edition 2014)by Chi Zijian (Author), Bruce Humes (Translator)
Work InformationThe Last Quarter of the Moon by Zijian Chi (2013)
   Books Read in 2020 (3,793) No current Talk conversations about this book.  Jakujin | Oct 12, 2018 |  no reviews | add a review
'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them'. At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman sits among the birch trees and thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer, living in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. An idyllic childhood playing by the river ends with her father's death and the growing realisation that her mother's and uncle's relationship is not as simple as she thought. Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict which marks the first step towards the end of their isolation... In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of her tribe but also to the transformation of China. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)895.136Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Chinese Chinese fiction 2010–LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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Wikipedia in English
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The author is Han, from China's northernmost province that abuts on or subsumes the grounds of indigenous peoples. Over the course of this novel, Chinese, Russian and Japanese state interests and individuals impinge on the life of the Evenki. By no means always hostile, but steadily deleterious. Several reviews say the book is grim, but I think this encroachment might have been told more savagely than it is. As for the number of deaths -- truly Shakespearean -- our narrator is a woman in old age, and she has the exhaustless array of forest accidents to recall.
The beauty crept up on me. Late in the piece I noticed I was being mugged by Evenki metaphors, songs, observations and succinct word pictures of the taiga -- on the 'Right Bank of the Argun', in the original Chinese title, in the Greater Khingan Mountain Range. The stories, too, work by accumulation, peoples' lives in sequence, with a subtle interweave of forecast and backsight. They are told in a key of realism, but on the other hand the shamanist universe Evenki believe in is real, so that one of the most affecting stories is of a woman called on to save others by her shaman dances, at the inevitable cost of loved ones of her own.
This review on a Chinese site gives an idea of what conditions the author told her story of the Evenki under, and also mentions which tales followed those of real people:
http://english.cri.cn/6909/2012/08/08/1942s715974.htm (