The White Mountain A Novel

by Tschinag, Galsan; Rout, Katharina

• ISBN13: 9781571310729
• ISBN10: 157131072X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-03-23
• Publisher: PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST

Summary

As the story begins, we hear of the birth of triplets to a woman who's birthed three times previously, though each child died shortly thereafter. This time, however, the birth goes well, "as easy as birthing is for a nanny goat." That same night, a family of five suffocates in their beds from the smoke of their home fire. Telling the tale is a young man, a child of the village, who comes to understand the magic of life, death, poetry, and dreams. Both a shaman and a storyteller, our narrator, Dshurunkuwaa, learns to make a unique place for himself in this far-flung world of the Tuvan people.

The White Mountain is Galsan Tschinag's wondrous final installment in a trilogy which began with Dshurunkuwaa's early years in The Blue Sky and continued with his adolescence in The Gray Earth. Gripping, lyrical, and full of mythic tales of life in a rural Mongolian village, The White Mountain is a classic of world literature written by one of its major figures.

Author Biography

Galsan Tschinag is a major voice in world literature. Called Irgit Schynykbaj-oglu Dshurukuwaa in his native Tuvan, he was born in the early forties in Mongolia. He studied at the University of Leipzig where he adopted German as his written language. He is the only member of the Tuvan tribe to use written language to tell stories, and thus to publish. His novel, The Blue Sky, was the first of his books to be available in English, though he is the author of more than thirty books which have been translated into French, Spanish, and Polish. As the chief of Tuvans in Mongolia, Tschinag led his people, scattered under Communist rule, back in a huge caravan to their original home in the high Altai Mountains. He currently lives alternately in the Altai, Ulaanbaatar, and Europe. Katharina Rout teaches English and Comparative Literature at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her translations from the German have been acclaimed widely.