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Tea of Ulaanbaatar
National Magazine Award finalist Christopher Howard's debut novel, Tea of Ulaanbaatar, tells the story of disaffected Peace Corps volunteer Warren, who flees life in late-capitalist America to find himself stationed in the post-Soviet industrial hell of urban Mongolia. As the American presence crumbles, Warren seeks escape in tsus, the mysterious "blood tea" that may be th...more
Paperback, 208 pages
Published
May 3rd 2011
by Seven Stories Press
(first published January 4th 2011)
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Review originally written for CCLaP, and also on my CCLaP best-of-2011 list!
I recently read A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian , and I was pretty disappointed. Like I said over there, it felt like paint-by-numbers noveling: take a fucked-up family, set them up in an “exotic” (to us Americans, anyway) culture and watch them deconstruct, filling out the plot with a quirky thing to tie it all together. In some ways, this description could also be used—very superficially—to describe Tea of Ula...more
I recently read A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian , and I was pretty disappointed. Like I said over there, it felt like paint-by-numbers noveling: take a fucked-up family, set them up in an “exotic” (to us Americans, anyway) culture and watch them deconstruct, filling out the plot with a quirky thing to tie it all together. In some ways, this description could also be used—very superficially—to describe Tea of Ula...more
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This book is extremely well written. Imagine falling into the midst of someone's fever dream, but an extraordinarily coherent incoherence. The only drawback, if it can be called that, is that you really care for no one on this entire disaffected Peace Corps team stationed in Ulaanbaatar. The narrative most closely follows a team member named Warren as he is slowly drawn in by the hallucinogenic red tea known as Tsus. What slowly appears (because you're just never quite sure) is that Tsus may wel...more
It would be easy to dismiss this book as another novel about disaffected Americans drawn into a drug culture and find themselves in over their heads. Two things make Howard's novel stand above the typical: setting and style. Tea of Ulaanbaatar is set in Mongolia among a group of Peace Corps volunteers. By the time we meet them, any sense of idealism has been sucked out of them by the bleak world of the crumbling capital, Ulaanbaatar. Howard is able to draw the collapse of this society in a reali...more
This is a fascinating book about dysfunctional Peace Corps workers stationed at an outpost in urban Mongolia. A hallucinegenic blood tea blinds them to harsh winters, homeless, starving and drunken natives, lack of electricity or health care and cruel isolation. My favorite part of the book are the dreams of Genghis Khan and the horde and the visions of a post apocalyptic future, with the Mongols once again in prominence. I may be prejudiced, since I love anything about Mongolia, but this book...more
I finished this book a few days ago and I've been trying to figure out what to write about it. I've never read anything like it before, so I've been at a loss for words. And although it was a short book, I found it difficult to read for long bouts of time; however, when I wasn't reading it, I longed for it much like the titular tea.
Howard writes like a fever dream feels. No quotation marks and things slide seamlessly from one scene to another. And towards the end of the novel, the reader even lo...more
Howard writes like a fever dream feels. No quotation marks and things slide seamlessly from one scene to another. And towards the end of the novel, the reader even lo...more
I was the editor of this, so accept my rating as biased. But if you like Cormac McCarthy, I don't see how you don't like Chris Howard. He's like McCarthy but more contemporary in his focus, wider in his global range, and flat out funnier. How can you say no to a book about a group of Peace Corps malcontents becoming involved with dealing a blood-red narcotic tea that gives those who drink it prescient visions of an impending global apocalypse? How can you be against that.
The strangeness of place steeped in a drug-tea – an intoxicating read.
A compelling nightmare vision.
Enthralling, captivating, I just wish I knew what happens in the end. But the "not-knowing" was Part of the allure.
This book started out well, but it got convoluted. still I didn't mind that as much as I minded the overly dry prose that never allowed me to feel a part of tthe story. This is a book without a single likeable character, and none are thouroughly developed. Still it entertained me in parts.
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