Kunzang ChodenBesprekingen

Simply told stories about lives of women in Bhutan.

The Circle of Karma tells the story of Tsomo, who is born in the mountainous kingdom of Bhutan in the 1940s/50s. She experiences a series of misfortunes—two unhappy marriages, a miscarriage, chronic illness—before she finally becomes a Buddhist nun. On the level of craft, this is not a particularly good book. I wasn't really convinced by Kunzang Choden's characters as people (characterisation is wildly inconsistent), and the book is riddled with typos (cooking with "cotiander", houses built with "wooden plants", "mani colleagues", etc.) and other basic issues (I lost track of how many times the narrative shifted from past to present tense and back, sometimes within the space of a paragraph). What interest the book has derives largely from the fact that, at the time of its publication almost 20 years ago, it was the first novel in English (perhaps the first novel?) written by a Bhutanese woman, and from its rich description of daily live in Bhutan before it began to open up to outsiders at all.½

What I love so much about holidays is, that I can read an interesting and nice book in one sitting.
And that's exactly what I did with this one. I had never read a book set in Bhutan and liked it very much.
I must admit that I deliberatly took off my western glasses, tainted by the time I was born in and the upbringing I received. For this book that worked very well and I enjoyed it a lot.

Recomnended!

This book is a series of short stories about the changing roles of women in Bhutan, the challenges they face, and their fears and strengths. Kunzang Choden is a natural storyteller and I very much enjoyed learning a bit about the cultural change occurring in Bhutan through reading these stories.

The first one is about an elder of a village. She practices the old Bon religion and acts as a spiritual medium. Her services are still sought after even though modern Buddhism has largely replaced Bon thoughout Bhutan.

Another story finds 18 year old Yeshima yearning for schooling. She watches her friend and neighbor go off to work each day and dreams what it would be like to travel to the city, work in an office and use computers. Even though the world is changing rapidly, culture and tradition dictate that she stay home to attend her ailing mother while her brothers receive the benefit of a good education. Her whole life is spent subservient to her parents and brothers until one day she hears about adult literacy classes and makes the decision to attend .

The title of the book is taken from the last story about an expert wool dyer, Tsheringmo, who teaches her grand niece the craft, art and folklore that she has accumulated over her lifetime as a master dyer. She was as well known for her stories as for the wonderfully colored wool she produced. There is a wonderful one explaining how sheep had wool of every color. A Tibetan minister had stolen a Chinese king's herd and the Empress in her anger issued a curse and all the sheep drowned except the black and white ones. And so today dyes have to be used to get the other colors. As Tsheringmo ages and becomes more feeble, the villagers reflect on what they are losing:
"But nobody could ever deny that just as Tsheringmo had colored the fabrics the people used to clothe themselves with, she had also brightened their lives with the tales she told them. Not simple tales but tales in colour."

In the prologue, one character describes the main character Tsomo by saying, "When Tsomo talks of her life, Lham Yeshi thinks of a river flowing its course. She talks smoothly most of the time, some memories bringing forth laughter like a gurgling brook, sometimes she roars passionately like a tumultuous river in spite and, like a river, she draws into her course everybody in her path."

I feel that is also a good description of the tone and pace of this book. I enjoyed it immensely, and felt I did learn a lot about Bhutanese culture and thinking. The author clearly describes the customs and attitudes that give context to and often create the situations in which the main character finds herself. She often does this by pointing out common sayings in response to situations, such as wives who are told "If you had taken better care of your husband, you would not have this problem" when their husbands are found cheating on them. In this way it reminded me of Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart". This book only missed 4 stars for me due to some occasionally awkward transitions and editing, but overall, a great read.½

C'est une charmante série d'histoires qui racontent la vie au village dans le Bhoutan. Avec beaucoup de simplicité, des descriptions précises et mises en situation typiques, Choden nous parle de la vie dans un pays mi-moderne mi-traditionnel. Elle fait le tour de différents villageois, ceux qui ont adopté une vie traditionnelle, ceux qui ont réussi dans la ville tout en mettant l'accent sur les femmes et leur lot de filles, de mères, de sœurs et d'épouses. De jeunes aux vieux, on parcourt toute la gamme des sentiments humains transposés dans un décor unique et révélateur.

Voyage dans une culture méconnue et tellement éloignée de notre judéo-christianisme.. oblige un autre regard de ce que nous sommes en découvrant un ailleurs où la condition humaine reste la nôtre aussi.

Written by a Bhutanese female author, this is the (fictional) life story of a Bhutanese woman who left her village as a young adult, and spent her life moving between various places in the area where Bhutan, India, Tibet, and Nepal meet. It is somewhere between a folk tale and a modern novel. I liked it a lot for its very lively account of the daily life of an illiterate but not stupid Bhutanese woman. It is somewhat feminist, but mostly very Buddhist.

The Circle of karma follows the life of Tsomo, a poor, illiterate Bhutanese woman. Born in a small village, she quickly learns that her life will be hard, not least because she is a woman. The men in her life constantly take advantage or neglect her, such as her father's refusal to teach her to read, or her husband's abandonment of her for her sister. Tsomo finds the strength to leave her village and embark on an itinerant life of hard labour, poverty, failed relationships and rootlessness, all the while clinging on to her religion as a source of solace.

I found The Circle of Karma to be an excellent read. It is an explicitly Buddhist novel, but one that concentrates on the everyday struggle to apply religion to Tsomo's life. The writing is rich with Buddhist religious imagery, but the story stays firmly grounded in Tsomo's mundane reality. There was also interesting ideas that I hadn't seen addressed before, such as how belief in reincarnation can be used to reinforce sexism. Although not particularly long, the book had an epic quality, in the sense that I had spent the entire of Tsomo's life with her, and really felt the processes of time passing and her ageing, and was genuinely emotionally invested in Tsomo's fate. It was, in short, an excellent novel about one woman's hard life, set against a vivid cultural background.

Très beau roman, qui fait découvrir une région méconnue et un mode de vie si lointain, une pensée si différente: c'est un vrai plaisir d'accompagner cette femme dans le voyage spirituel de sa vie. Choden met bien en relief la condition de la femme dans son pays, sans toutefois s'appesantir.