Silk Roads, Steppe Roads is not quite the general historical overview implied by its title and subtitle. It is instead a deep dive (literally) into Sui and Tang dynasty tombs in three places in northwestern China and Mongolia, places—in other words—where China bumped up against peoples from Central Asia and the steppe. Its detailed and…
Author Laleh Khadivi is best known for her “Kurdish Trilogy”—The Age of Orphans, The Walking and A Good Country—which explores the lives of three generations of migrant men and their experiences in the United States. The Iranian-Kurdish-American writer describes them as “books written in the voice of men about men’s worlds”. Her new novel, set…
Memduh Şevket Esendal may be the most famous Turkish writer most English speakers (including this one) have never heard of. In Turkey, however, people will have come across him in school where he has long had a secure place in Turkish textbooks. This has not however always worked in his favour: to paraphrase from translator…
The Greeks invented Asia, or at least gave us the word. But the binaries of Greek/Asian, Greek/Barbarian, as well as man/woman, derive not from antiquity, but from modern discourse. Or rather, modern discourse has amplified and normalized a particular strain of Greek thought that emerged in sixth-century Athens. From the Athenian perspective, a woman should…
Award-winning Guzel Yakhina’s latest novel is a fictionalised life of the great (and infamous) Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (or Eisen as he was familiarly known). Readers’ knowledge of Eisenstein may extend only to his 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin and the famous scene of the baby carriage careening down the long Odessa Steps. I was…
In modern Chinese, guojia, commonly translated as “country” or “state”, joins guo to jia, “family”. Popular sayings make the connection sound reassuring: “When the family is harmonious, all things prosper”; “The foundation of all under Heaven lies in the state; the foundation of the state lies in the family.” Peace. Craig Clunas’s Sons of Heaven:…
Despite the steady stream of works of all genres now being translated into English, it can still take a long time for even the work of award-winning authors to show up in the West. Twenty years ago, novelist and playwright Yukiko Motoya’s novella, Love at Least, was published in Japan and was nominated for the…
Marco Polo got the nickname “Millione”, not so much for the riches he brought back to Venice, but for the number of lies readers perceived in his description of distant Cathay. A man from Transoxiana named Ali Akbar gave himself the surname “Khatayi” (“Chinese” in Persian) after travelling there for six years and writing, in Istanbul…
The Yarsanis are a unique ethno-religious group centered in Kermanshah, in Iranian Kurdistan. With estimated adherents surpassing one million, this little-known syncretic religion dates from the 14th century and has elements reminiscent of Zoroanstrianism and other non-Islamic traditions, and is central to The Shadeless Border, Iranian Kurdish writer and folklorist Jiyar Jahan Fard’s first novel…
Parents are few and far between in Haruki Murakami novels. The Japanese author’s protagonists are adrift, often removed from their friends but nearly always removed from their families. This fictional alienation reflects a postwar dilution of collectivism in Japan as Murakami was growing up, not to mention a widening ideological gap between the wartime generation…
The “wars” in the title of Guy Laron’s new history of the past century and a half are as much metaphorical as literal; few readers will need much convincing of his thesis that “energy is one of the core instruments of geopolitics.” There is much to be said for Laron’s adopted lens. Oil provides a…
“Under the Wave Off Kanagawa”, popularly known as “The Great Wave”, is without a doubt the most celebrated Japanese woodblock print. It is also the most recognised work of Japanese art tout court. Ask anyone with an interest in the genre and they will tell you that it was made by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) which,…
When Dawn Chin is assigned a high school history project to interview a family member, she picks her paternal grandmother and learns more about her family history than she expected, including a couple of life-altering secrets. All the lies, all the secrets, the masks her family wears, the ones she puts on too, like a…
Iranian tradition held that the first, ancient dynasty of kings had mastered all the useful sciences, from astronomy to medicine, and recorded them in books of wisdom. Some claimed the prophet Zoroaster himself to be the ultimate author. These books were well guarded in the great palace we call Persepolis. In one terrible night of…
In 1958, a Kashmiri poet who earned his living cutting timber sat down in front of a radio microphone and stumbled over a verse from a printed edition of his own work. His name was Samad Mir, and he was one of the best-loved mystic poets of his day. His interviewers were JL Kaul, a…