A myth revisited

Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong is part of the Myth Series. Previously I have read Alexander McCall-Smith's take on Scottish myth of Dream Angus. It's an interesting concept taking old myths and re-energise them, taking traditional storytelling taking to a new level.

In short, Binu and the Great Wall is the story of Binu travelling across China to the Great Wall to give her husband a winter coat where he was conscripted by the King to work on the wall. However, the story behind the story is about sadness and greed that Binu meets on her travels, at the heart she is a traditionalists believing in the good of people but her heart is shattered again and again by the people she meet on the way.
Josefine

Title: Binu and the Great Wall Author: Su Tong ISBN: 978-1-84195-904-7

Chinese novels

Chinese consumer products have flooded the market for several years, if not decades, which have also spurred the general interest for China. More and more Chinese authors are now translated and published in the western world. I have recently read two different authors from China. Empress Orchid by Anchee Min is probably one of my more recent favourites. She takes us into the Forbidden City in the last decades of the last Chinese emperor, where we meet one of his last empresses Orchid.
Moving forward to the 21st century, we find Z lost in London and the words of the English language. A concise Chinese-English dictionary for lovers by Xiaolu Guo is cleverly written as we can follow Z’s road to learning the English language as the sentences becomes more and more complex and she finally masters the different pronoms, verbs and tenses.
Josefine

My recommendations: The death of woman Wang by Jonathan D Spence

A beginning a middle and an end

Any book will have a beginning, middle and an end, that’s pretty simple right? And there are as many writers as there are versions of how to accomplish this. A winter in China by Douglas Galbraith manages to do this in a very unique way.
The story is set in 1930s China at the outbreak of the invasion of the Japanese. A young English woman gets trapped with other foreigners during the caption of Nanking. If you have knowledge of the atrocities made by the Japanese in the city, the readings of Galbraith makes you shiver.
But it is not only that, which makes the story interesting, it is the way Galbraith tells it that captures you. In one chapter he takes us as far ahead in the story as he takes us back to another event in the story. In between this, he manages to throw in different perspective of what the different characters in the book are doing at the same moment. Does this sound complicated and messy? Maybe a bit, but when you read the book it flows so good that you don’t think about it and you don’t get messed up. My best recommendation is to read the book to get an understanding of the technical part. It is worth every penny you spend on it, or why not see if they have it at your local library.
Josefine

My recommendations: Empress Orchid by Anchee Min