Yes, exactly. The recurring passages about the trains moving across the plains are very evocative, but the main bulk of the text itself is a rather heavy read. Not so much because of complexity or dense description but because the author seems to need to explain many things, especially Yedigei's thoughts, in a great deal of detail. You suggest this was fairly common in books at the time; was this sort of Soviet style an attempt to make literature more accesible?

It's certainly a book worth reading for someone outside that culture, I'd suspect - there are two old Kazakh legends that form an important part of the narrative and are both fascinating to someone who likes to gather myths and legends from around the world. The characters, I think, stand up to psychological scrutiny and while Aitmatov was probably simply making use of an era when criticism of the Stalinist purges was bering allowed, while problems closer to home had to be skirted around, the science fictional elements perhaps are his suggestion that things have not changed so much, and the incident at the graveyard hints at this in a cautious way, while maintaining some degree of plausible deniability by making Tansykbaev a relic of an older era.

While there are things here I like, I suspect the somewhat wooden prose will prevent it from being re-read purely for pleasure.

 This afternoon I re-read "Eeyore's Birthday." Is this the most perfect story ever written? 

Not sure about that, Ted, but it certainly has as much psychological insight as many.  Eeyore is like pretty well every character in Jane Austen's Emma (which I have just finished): whatever he says you know perfectly well he means something else.

I much enjoyed the burst balloon this board gave me for my birthday.

JP Vinyl,

It is interesting what you write about Indian books. I don't know much about this.

My friends sometimes give me contemporary Russian books that they bring with them from Russia.
I don't know very much, but I think they read mostly detective stories in Russia.
For example, a housewife walks by mistake into some mafia project and how she escapes and fools everybody.
I recently read detective story by Tatyana Ustinova "Close people". They discover the body of a man at a building site. The "boss" of the building company is divorced and has a son that he raises by himself. The story ends with a discovery that his second in comand and ex-wife of the boss were plotting to get his company by framing him. They had an affair, of course.


I don't think they read many multi-layered epic book. As far as I can see people like fast moving detective stories in simple language.

What Indian books do you like to read?

Daniel Barenboim: Everything is Connected - The Power of Music.  (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

I'm relishing this book and was instantly captivated by Barenboim's claim that 'Music has a much larger world of associations at its disposal precisely because of its ambivalent nature; it is both inside and outside the world.'   He also articulates so well, in 200 pages, today's mushrooming tension in the region of the far Mediterranean.

Constant reminders, too, of the work and writing of my theatrical guru, Peter Brook.  'The Empty Space', 'The Shifting Point' (40 years of theatrical exploration: 1946-1987) and 'The Deadly Theatre'.  Invaluable for practical use during a long run in the West End!   And Barenboim also stimulates interest in the potent use of silence, in performance, which reminded me, too, of a sense of outrage when premature applause invades an almost holy space.

Most of all, I appreciate his generosity of spirit when his largesse is free from a world of pedants, ever clutching their narrow prejudices to their bosoms like feather boas!

A gift at £12 99 (hardback) from play.com.

That's an interesting paragraph, though I feel it's a bit unfair.  I don't think there was a direct link between de Beauvoir badly coping with old age and the revelations re stalinistic USSR.  The end of Stalin, the news of the camps, the Hungarian revolution and suppression came well before she reached old age.  And it didn't stop her from believing in a socialist society.  In fact the political event that really darkened the first years of her old age was the Algerian war: the constant news of torture and illegal imprisonment, the return of the Gaulle,...

Apologies for coming back to this topic so late...  Also, thank you for those beautiful pictures, tp!

I think that's an excellent decision, t-p.

A dear friend nabbed this in a second-hand bookstore for me last year, and has been putting off giving it to me ever since due to its hefty weight.



Its all mine, and you can't have it.