The Circle of Karma

In the prologue, one character describes the main character Tsomo by saying, "When Tsomo talks of her life, Lham Yeshi thinks of a river flowing its course. She talks smoothly most of the time, some memories bringing forth laughter like a gurgling brook, sometimes she roars passionately like a tumultuous river in spite and, like a river, she draws into her course everybody in her path."

I feel that is also a good description of the tone and pace of this book. I enjoyed it immensely, and felt I did learn a lot about Bhutanese culture and thinking. The author clearly describes the customs and attitudes that give context to and often create the situations in which the main character finds herself. She often does this by pointing out common show more sayings in response to situations, such as wives who are told "If you had taken better care of your husband, you would not have this problem" when their husbands are found cheating on them. In this way it reminded me of Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart". This book only missed 4 stars for me due to some occasionally awkward transitions and editing, but overall, a great read. show less

The Circle of karma follows the life of Tsomo, a poor, illiterate Bhutanese woman. Born in a small village, she quickly learns that her life will be hard, not least because she is a woman. The men in her life constantly take advantage or neglect her, such as her father's refusal to teach her to read, or her husband's abandonment of her for her sister. Tsomo finds the strength to leave her village and embark on an itinerant life of hard labour, poverty, failed relationships and rootlessness, all the while clinging on to her religion as a source of solace.

I found The Circle of Karma to be an excellent read. It is an explicitly Buddhist novel, but one that concentrates on the everyday struggle to apply religion to Tsomo's life. The show more writing is rich with Buddhist religious imagery, but the story stays firmly grounded in Tsomo's mundane reality. There was also interesting ideas that I hadn't seen addressed before, such as how belief in reincarnation can be used to reinforce sexism. Although not particularly long, the book had an epic quality, in the sense that I had spent the entire of Tsomo's life with her, and really felt the processes of time passing and her ageing, and was genuinely emotionally invested in Tsomo's fate. It was, in short, an excellent novel about one woman's hard life, set against a vivid cultural background. show less

The Circle of Karma tells the story of Tsomo, who is born in the mountainous kingdom of Bhutan in the 1940s/50s. She experiences a series of misfortunes—two unhappy marriages, a miscarriage, chronic illness—before she finally becomes a Buddhist nun. On the level of craft, this is not a particularly good book. I wasn't really convinced by Kunzang Choden's characters as people (characterisation is wildly inconsistent), and the book is riddled with typos (cooking with "cotiander", houses built with "wooden plants", "mani colleagues", etc.) and other basic issues (I lost track of how many times the narrative shifted from past to present tense and back, sometimes within the space of a paragraph). What interest the book has derives show more largely from the fact that, at the time of its publication almost 20 years ago, it was the first novel in English (perhaps the first novel?) written by a Bhutanese woman, and from its rich description of daily live in Bhutan before it began to open up to outsiders at all. show less

What I love so much about holidays is, that I can read an interesting and nice book in one sitting.
And that's exactly what I did with this one. I had never read a book set in Bhutan and liked it very much.
I must admit that I deliberatly took off my western glasses, tainted by the time I was born in and the upbringing I received. For this book that worked very well and I enjoyed it a lot.

Recomnended!

Written by a Bhutanese female author, this is the (fictional) life story of a Bhutanese woman who left her village as a young adult, and spent her life moving between various places in the area where Bhutan, India, Tibet, and Nepal meet. It is somewhere between a folk tale and a modern novel. I liked it a lot for its very lively account of the daily life of an illiterate but not stupid Bhutanese woman. It is somewhat feminist, but mostly very Buddhist.

Très beau roman, qui fait découvrir une région méconnue et un mode de vie si lointain, une pensée si différente: c'est un vrai plaisir d'accompagner cette femme dans le voyage spirituel de sa vie. Choden met bien en relief la condition de la femme dans son pays, sans toutefois s'appesantir.

Voyage dans une culture méconnue et tellement éloignée de notre judéo-christianisme.. oblige un autre regard de ce que nous sommes en découvrant un ailleurs où la condition humaine reste la nôtre aussi.