Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... The Garden of Evening Mists (editie 2013)door Tan Twan Eng (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkDe tuin van de avondnevel door Tan Twan Eng
Booker Prize (73) Top Five Books of 2013 (130) Top Five Books of 2014 (112) » 18 meer Garden-fiction (11) Top Five Books of 2021 (184) Reading Globally (32) Books Read in 2023 (4,764) To Read (266) BBC World Book Club (165) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden.
It took me some time to get into this book, because I didn't really like the main character. But in the end it gripped me and it stayed with me as a beautiful book. The language is beautiful and the history is great. ( ) This is the second book I have read by this Malaysian author, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. Teoh Yun Ling is a judge in Kuala Lumpur retiring one day in the late 1980s, and the novel is set partly during the Second World War when she was a Japanese prisoner of war, and partly in 1951 when she was learning the art of Japanese horticulture from Nakamura Aritomo, a Japanese expert who remained in Malaya during the war. As was the case with The House of Doors, I found the flitting between timelines sometimes confusing, especially as this sometimes happened in section breaks on consecutive pages. Nevertheless, I love the poetical writing style of this author. This is above all, a novel about memory and its loss over time, as shown by Teoh trying to come to terms with her memories of wartime torture and privation in a slave labour camp, her memories of her younger sister who was forced to work in the labour camp brothel and who was killed along with almost all the other prisoners when Japan lost the war, and her mother's progressive dementia as she retreats in her mind from the memory of losing her daughter. Despite all this sadness and tragedy, and a number of other deaths and suffering during the communist-inspired State of Emergency in the 1950s, I found this an inspiring and thought-provoking read, at least partly because I was reading it on holiday in Malaysia and finished it on my return from a day trip to Cameron Highlands, where the 1951 strand of the story is set. I was blown away by Tan Twan Eng's first novel [b:The Gift of Rain|1219949|The Gift of Rain|Tan Twan Eng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328494577l/1219949._SY75_.jpg|1208426]. Although I found that more powerful than [b:The Garden of Evening Mists|12031532|The Garden of Evening Mists|Tan Twan Eng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333033941l/12031532._SX50_.jpg|16997854], this second novel is also beautifully written, atmospheric, and insightful. Both novels are set in Malaysia during and after the Second World War, but each approaches the Japanese occupation differently. The protagonist of [b:The Garden of Evening Mists|12031532|The Garden of Evening Mists|Tan Twan Eng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333033941l/12031532._SX50_.jpg|16997854], Teoh Yun Ling, is sent to a Japanese slave labour camp with her sister and is the only survivor. The novel contemplates the legacy of this trauma in her life. She becomes a judge and prosecutes war criminals, trying over the years to find where her sister died. I found her a fascinating protagonist. The narrative includes extensive flashbacks, as Yun Ling has retired due to ill-health and is writing down her recollections. Via her postwar experiences, the reader observes her complex emotions regarding nationality and ethnicity in the wake of horrific war crimes. Initially she blames all Japanese people for the death of her sister and her own suffering, then forms a bond with the Japanese emperor's former gardener. I found the details she learns about traditional Japanese gardening, woodblock printing, archery, and tattooing beguiling. The mystery around what happened to her unfolds gradually and at the end there is still inevitable ambiguity about who was responsible. This is a novel that considers atrocities with considerable delicacy, without downplaying how terrible they were. Despite being a much longer book, [b:The Gift of Rain|1219949|The Gift of Rain|Tan Twan Eng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328494577l/1219949._SY75_.jpg|1208426] had a faster and steadier pace. The more contemplative pace of [b:The Garden of Evening Mists|12031532|The Garden of Evening Mists|Tan Twan Eng|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333033941l/12031532._SX50_.jpg|16997854] is nonetheless compelling and the writing strikingly evocative. [b:The Garden of Evening Mists|12031532|The Garden of Evening Mists |Tan Twan Eng|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333033941s/12031532.jpg|16997854] is a complicated story as it wends its way back and forth through Yun Ling Teoh's life and fluctuating memories, from old age to youth to adulthood, and the torture suffered at the hands of her Japanese captors in wartime Malaya. Eng writes beautifully of the jungle settings in the book and of the garden she yearns to build in memory of her lost sister with the aid of a Japanese gardener. It is possible to visualize the views from the garden and its plantings as well as the neighboring tea plantation, even to taste the tea and smell the air Eng describes yet the pacing set me adrift in spite of the evocative prose. Smatterings of Malayan history are deposited throughout the story and call for further exploration to clarify some confusion from the flashback technique. The plot and its violent swings through the terrors of occupation and later communist guerrilla insurgency sent me elsewhere for reading relief but the final pages of the book brought peace to both the Yun Ling and this reader. While none of the characters are explored adequately and relationships are puzzling (why the bad relationship with her parents, what is her resistance to Frederick, and why the oddly constrained but lifelong passion for Aritomo), her archery symbolizes Yun Ling’s reborn strength and grace as she approaches the challenges of aging and illness.
The language is as lush as the landscape he seeks to describe. His prose is punctuated with clever imagery; in reuniting with Teoh, Eng brilliantly describes Frederick's wry reaction "A smile skims across his face, capsizing an instant later." Though on the whole the descriptive narrative was attractive, at times more concision might have saved it from becoming overwrought, as in my view it was, and rather frustratingly holding back what was otherwise a compelling and unique story. As in his first novel, The Gift of Rain, Tan employs exotic settings and mystical aspects of Japanese culture to drive his narrative. But this time the effect is darker. Aritomo's mastery of the art of shakkei - "Borrowed Scenery" - initially seems enlightened, but as we come to question his true motives for absconding to this obscure backwater, it appears increasingly deceptive. Though later plot elements surrounding a search for buried wartime treasure do not always complement the atmosphere Tan has carefully constructed, this is a beautiful, dark and wistful exploration of loss and remembrance that, appropriately, will stay with you long after reading. This novel ticks many boxes: its themes are serious, its historic grounding solid, its structure careful, its old-fashioned ornamentalism respectable. The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page: "for a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes"; "For a long while he does not say anything. Finally he begins to speak in a slow, steady voice." The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long: "We were like two moths around a candle, circling closer and closer to the flames, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first." Despite the dramatic events, the overall effect is one of surprising blandness, like something you've read before. This is a good old-fashioned story with a plot that arcs gracefully, maintains suspense, and stays true to characterisation. Yun Ling’s independent spirit and her anger seep like ink-stains into the narrative, but its distilled essence is a quieter appraisal of the dichotomy of memory, its treacherous failures, its cruel conveniences, its fadeout and deliverance. Outside Magnus’s house are two statues—one is of Mnemosyne the goddess of memory and the other is of her twin sister, the goddess of forgetting, whose name, of course, has been forgotten. Here, too, the garden is the conceit. “A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,” Yun Ling accuses Aritomo, “Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.” The garden that Yun Ling intends to make is about more than a desire to preserve the memory of her sister, though, for in many ways, it was the idea of this garden that kept the sisters hopeful through their long internment. The Japanese garden, with its many deceptions and beauties, becomes a well-formed metaphor for the ways in which our lives are lived. Aritomo, the enigmatic former gardener to the Emperor of Japan who glides through Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, tells his female apprentice in the Cameron Highlands of early-1950s Malaya that “Every aspect of gardening is a form of deception”. Just the same applies, you might argue, to the art of fiction, with its incomplete points-of-view and deceptive trompe d’oeil vistas. Tan’s story here is just as elegantly planted as his Man Booker-long listed debut The Gift of Rain, and even more tantalisingly evocative. Suffused with a satisfying richness of colour and character, it still abounds in hidden passageways and occult corners. Mysteries and secrets persist. Tan dwells often on the borderline states, the in between areas, of Japanese art: the archer’s hiatus before the arrow speeds from the bow; the patch of skin that a master of the horimono tattoo will leave bare; or the “beautiful and sorrowful” moment “just as the last leaf is about to drop”. PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
"Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?"--P. [4] of cover. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.92Literature English English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |