Tag: outer mongolia

BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | November 2017

Our eclectic November top ten reads rejoice in strong women and have a radical, cosmopolitan flavour. We continue our celebration of 15 years of the Childrens’ Bookshow, highlighting two more books featured in this year’s tour. Happy reading! Georgia @bookblast

Strong Women

teffi pushkin press bookblast diary reviewRasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi (Pushkin Press) buy here
Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France, Anne Marie Jackson

“A semi-literate peasant and a counsellor to the Tsar, a hardened sinner and a man of prayer, a shape-shifter with the name of God on his lips. They called him cunning. Was there really nothing to him but cunning?  I shall tell you about my two brief encounters with him . . .” Teffi’s portrait of Rasputin, and her description of his unwanted advances, is a disturbing reminder of how sex-pests using positions of power to get their dirty way are not a new phenomenon.  All of the women saying #MeToo on Twitter are standing on the shoulders of the women who came before them.

Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya – who wrote under the pseudonym Teffi – was born in 1872 into a family prominent in Saint Petersburg society. An essayist, poet and playwright, she became so popular that there were Teffi sweets and a Teffi perfume. She supported socialism and the 1905 revolution, and worked for the first Bolshevik paper, New Life, which was later shut down by the Leninist authorities. She left Russia in 1919 and settled in France, where she died in 1952. Her engaging, witty and empathic writing belies a bleak undertow of loss and nostalgia for lost worlds as she writes about life before the revolution, fellow writers, emigration, and life in Paris.

Oriana Fallaci by Cristina de Stefano (Other Press) buy here
Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

“I’ve always been political in my writing, actions and life. I grew up in a political family. I was educated in politics . . . The risk of Fascism is my fixation,” wrote Oriana Fallaci. Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | November 2017

Dreaming of Outer Mongolia (3) | Of Shamans, Buddhists & Shangri-La

Arkhan Valley
Our Toyota 4×4 lurched and dodged between the trees. Nyam Bileg seemed to be winning at an Olympian task. At one point he drove at a perilous angle along the edge of a dry gully.

bookblast khalkha wife dael
19thC Khalkha wife’s dael (National Museum, UB)

When I’d arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Oyuna handed me a blue dael – the traditional three-quarter length cotton, silk or wool gown worn by men and women. Serving as a coat, robe or a dress, for every day or ceremonial occasions, it buttons beneath the right arm and at the right shoulder to a high, round collar. It is convenient for riding, travel and extremes of temperature.  When cinched at the waist, a pocket of material is formed for carrying personal items. She told me I would find it useful. Now I was beginning to understand why. It offered a handy way of being private when peeing out in the wilds.

One last stop and we’d be home and dry, or so I thought, as I closed my dael and wound my way back to the 4×4 through cow parsley and gorse bushes. A large puddle turned out to be a stream flooding across the forest track. The front wheels jammed in tight, and the back wheels spun deep into the mud.  We watched Oyuntsetseg, Ider Od and their companions disappear down the hill in their resilient little Russian-built UAZ van. Their driver, Tulga, was a Dayan Deerkh man, so he knew the lie of the land. Some 3 hours later, the Toyota was pulled out by a tractor.

bookblast arkhan valley mongoliaMan vs. wolf
We arrived in Arkhan Valley in time for cow milking. Calves frisked around outside the corral until their mothers were done, and then they were let loose. Great patches of permafrost were pointed out to me as I watched. Continue reading Dreaming of Outer Mongolia (3) | Of Shamans, Buddhists & Shangri-La

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