Comments on: What’s the Narrative?

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:33:35 +0000

“Cancer Ward” is a must read for me to help understand what Soviet Central Asia is like from one perspective. And it also really makes you miss Shashlik if you haven’t had it for awhile.

By: Noah

Noah — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:43:56 +0000

I think it’s “nice” of the court to cancel the very stiff fines, but since they didn’t overturn convictions, these people are still convicted criminals under Uzbek law, so it’s hardly a satisfactory resolution. There’s a longer discussion here to be had about the law and its affect on society, but just like the Hopkirk discussion I didn’t want to get into above, I don’t want to throw Asher’s post completely off the rails.

You can get my email address from Nathan, by the way, and we can discuss this directly if you want.

By: shohmurod

shohmurod — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:34:33 +0000

This is unrelated to the thread, I am just trying to reach Noah.

Noah, what do you think about this as it relates to a recent conversation we had:

Uzbek court overturns Baptist fines
http://townhall.com/news/religion/2010/01/05/uzbek_court_overturns_baptist_fines

By: Jakob

Jakob — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:29:22 +0000

I didn’t read the Kite Runner, but “Wasted Vigil” doesn’t really picture Afghanistan as a narrative intro into Central Asia but rather expects from the reader some reading into EoA’s list mentioned. I assume … Otherwise I guess it will “just” leave a very powerful impression of the place it’s set at but no “stateside” view.

By: A

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:44:12 +0000

Just finished the “The Wasted Vigil,” which, though not without its own problems does blow “Kite Runner” away and mostly avoid the kind of critique expressed by Miller above. Also Afghan-centric though.

By: David M

David M — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:17:29 +0000

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 01/04/2010 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:43:20 +0000

The Railway by Hamid Ismailov always deserves to be bigged-up (and not simply because I reviewed it for neweurasia way back when...) since it seems to be less-influenced by Russian literature and more by Magic Realism, with heady doses of sufi hagiography thrown in.

By: Jakob

Jakob — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:52:24 +0000

I just finished “Cancer Ward” by Solshenitsyn which is set in Tashkent. Although the book itself does not deal with Central Asia (it’s customs, life …) as such, it captures some characters (patients from the ward from different areas) and especially the last chapter when Kostoglotov leaves the hospital, wanders around Tashkent and then leaves on the train to UshTerek left me with images from my own experiences in Xinjiang (I have never been to Uzbekistan). It’s to much about other issues to be an explicit introduction to Central Asia but as an add-on to the reading experience does in the last pages give some good insight.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:50:15 +0000

I was going to say Monica Whitlock, but Noah beat me to it. It’s a book that really should be brought back into print (and one to be emulated if anyone wants to write about the Kyrg-Kazakh-Xinjiang parts of Central Asia in a similar way)

By: Noah

Noah — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:52:35 +0000

I agree with Oldschool that if you open up the Russian sources there's a lot more there, but once you cross that line obviously you'd better not stop and start figuring in the actual body of Central Asian lit written in local languages. As far as the old Russian vostokovedy go, though, Valikhanov and Nalivkin shouldn't be mentioned without Barthold--who can be read in English. Daniel Brower's work (like Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire) is a way to access a lot of that stuff, particularly Nalivkin, in English and see how it functioned as part of the larger Russian colonial narrative. I actually don't recommend Hopkirk to people, though I'm not going to get into it and turn this into a pro/anti Hopkirk post, but I will say that thanks to him a number of the old travelogues and autobiographical pieces that he used as sources were republished and are available in new paperback editions. There are a lot of cool older books like The Man Who Would Be King or The Spy Who Disappeared that are fun to read and might get people excited about discovering the region. This is all to say, though, that the book I recommend most to people who are interested in enough to read one book about CA is Monica Whitlock's Land Beyond the River: The Untold Story of Central Asia. It's not only a great book full of interesting stories, it's one in which the author allows a lot of very interesting people in the 20th century history of Central Asia--or their direct descendants and relatives--to tell their own story. So if you want the story of Hindustani from his own son, it's here, and so is everything from jadids and the basmachis to settled calm of the 1970s Soviet Union and the chaos of the Tajik Civil War. I think it's really a wonderful book, it's a quick read (and a page-turner at that) and I can't see many people putting it down and still not understanding what it is about Central Asia that makes people interested.