Energy Lost

fllmTHJM Domini continuedfrom previous page of his yurt. This portable home, with a handful of others, makes up another clannish good-weather ail in the foothills ofthe Altai, the historic sheepherding highlands of Mongolia's Tuvans. Our boy-narrator too has a name an American reader will have trouble sorting out: Dshurukuwaa. By book's end, the child's about seven, but he's already a seasoned herder. One of the most engaging passages in The Blue Sky renders Dshuru's agitated yet knowing observations while a family party comes into focus, changing from a "grayish-dark speck" to individual figures and, finally, to brother, sister, and father. The process unfolds over hours, while the riders cross a far-off river plain beneath the shepherd's ridge, but, throughout, the kindergarten-age boy controls his livestock— and himself. To the best of my knowledge (buttressed by a couple ofweb searches), till now these Central Asian peoples have gone without novelistic treatment. One hears occasionally about callous treatment at the hands of Beijing rulers, and one sees, now and then, an atmospheric photograph of a Tuvan family. But the hearts and minds of these nomads haven't yet found expression via the primary storytelling mode of Euro-America. Thus, Galsan Tschinag, born in the Altai but writing in German, his third or fourth language, is to be praised, to begin with, for having brought off something we recognize as a novel. Here, the explanatory notes appended by both author and translator don't feel indulgent. A reader wants to know how this unique artifact came to be— though as a reviewer, I think it best to let others discover Tschinag's remarkable life journey on their own. I'll note only that the author describes his novel as the first of an "autobiographical trilogy," and claims "the latter books contain stories more tragic than...Blue Sky." Also, the appendixes include a glossary, which seems likewise appropriate. To check what dshula means, for instance, or dshut, confirms Katharina Rout's wisdom in not translating the first as "household votive lamp" and the second as "winter storm season." Such terms must've appeared in their original in the German as well, and so Rout and her author together nail both sensation and emotion,juggling formal language with side-of-the-mouth. But the accomplishment is finally Tschinag's, and the touches of indigenous vocabulary are only a small part of his world-building. From the first, we sink into the awestruck specificity of a child's apprehension: the lambs stayed tethered to the hone (a rope ofsoft yak-hair, for young stock) and formed a square, white patch. The women and girls were milking yaks at the dshele (a tether-line of hemp, for full-grown animals). All around me squirts of milk were drumming into pails of resonating aspen wood; each sounded different, from a bright hiss to the dark gurgle of water bubbling up from an earth eye. Till now these CentralAsian peoples have gone without novelistic treatment. It's one thing to pick out the tune of the yakmilk , to enumerate the exotic bits and pieces of a life, and it's another to enter the community spirit and embody its shared trial. Tschinag has the latter sort of imagination, a novelist's. He has a sense of shape, for instance, confining Blue Sky largely to a single difficult year, during which Dshuru's circle of loved ones shrinks and shrinks again. More impressive still is his emotional balance. Blue Sky generates honest warmth for its milieu and its mores, a warmth implicit in the milking passage, but it never sinks into nostalgia. The boy's grandmother operates as the closest thing to a sentimental icon, a terse voice of decision and insight, but she's not in fact the mother to either Schynyk or his wife. In revealing how this woman came to make her home in his yurt, during his infancy , the adult narrator casts a cold eye on Tuvan venality and neglect. The same frankness distinguishes other observations regarding his old enej: her close-cropped head, her hard riding, her masculine way oftaking a pee—traits that...