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Kuraj
An epic and moving historical novel about a nomadic girl's search for home.
Born in the late 1930s on the Central Asian steppe, Naja is the daughter of a clan chieftain of the Tushan nomads, proud descendants of Genghis Khan. When her fiercely independent father, U'lan, hears of Stalin's plan to bring the Tushan under state control and make them settle permanently in collective farms, he pledges to join forces with the invading German army. It is a pledge of honor that will take her father to the hell of Stalingrad and change Naja's life forever by eventually bringing her, at the age of nine, to ruined postwar Cologne.
From there she must learn to adapt to a strange new culture, and to the strange family that has taken her in. But as Naja gradually grows more comfortable in this alien world, the memories of her young life on the steppe call out to her. She begins a difficult search for her past―and the past of her people―with only the word kuraj (Tushan for tumbleweed) as her talisman and guide.
Born in the late 1930s on the Central Asian steppe, Naja is the daughter of a clan chieftain of the Tushan nomads, proud descendants of Genghis Khan. When her fiercely independent father, U'lan, hears of Stalin's plan to bring the Tushan under state control and make them settle permanently in collective farms, he pledges to join forces with the invading German army. It is a pledge of honor that will take her father to the hell of Stalingrad and change Naja's life forever by eventually bringing her, at the age of nine, to ruined postwar Cologne.
From there she must learn to adapt to a strange new culture, and to the strange family that has taken her in. But as Naja gradually grows more comfortable in this alien world, the memories of her young life on the steppe call out to her. She begins a difficult search for her past―and the past of her people―with only the word kuraj (Tushan for tumbleweed) as her talisman and guide.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 21, 2022
I read the German translation.
This could've been an amazing book, but it's downfall was the structure and amount of insinuations of events.
I picked Kuraj up, because I've not read much about nomad life in central Asia.
We follow Naja and get culture and history lessons throughout the book. What really took me out of the story was that finally when we got back to Naja, she immediately started telling us about historical events or folklore. While that in itself would've been interesting it really made me mad, because I wanted to know more about HER.
The ending didn't wrap up in any way I was satisfied with and it felt really rushed. Especially all her relationships and divorces and marriages were mentioned in a few sentences and was never really explained properly.
A shame really.
This could've been an amazing book, but it's downfall was the structure and amount of insinuations of events.
I picked Kuraj up, because I've not read much about nomad life in central Asia.
We follow Naja and get culture and history lessons throughout the book. What really took me out of the story was that finally when we got back to Naja, she immediately started telling us about historical events or folklore. While that in itself would've been interesting it really made me mad, because I wanted to know more about HER.
The ending didn't wrap up in any way I was satisfied with and it felt really rushed. Especially all her relationships and divorces and marriages were mentioned in a few sentences and was never really explained properly.
A shame really.
December 1, 2018
Romanzo a tratti bello e intenso e a tratti un po' più noioso, che ha il pregio di farci conoscere la storia, le tradizioni e soprattutto la cultura delle popolazioni nomade dell'estremo est asiatico.
June 7, 2020
Honestly, this was so dense, I skimmed most of it.
December 24, 2014
The narrator of this story is Naja, a young Tunshan girl who at the end of World War Two finds herself living as the foster daughter of a German family in Cologne. The novel is split into three distinct parts and Part 1 begins with Naja trying to come to terms with her new life in Germany whilst clinging to recent memories of living on the steppes of Central Asia. What begins as her own experience moves quickly into a lengthy and detailed description of nomadic life on the steppe* and a history of the Tunshan going back to the time of Genghis Khan and beyond. The evocation of this ancient and in 1940 mostly unchanged life and culture is sometimes exquisite and though fascinating, be warned, the narrative pace in this part of the book is slow at best.
* For my sins I'm a bit of a pedant in that I always like to know what country a novel is set in but this is difficult here given the nomadic lifestyle and that most of the locations in Part 1 are referred to in non-current geographic terms. That said, I think the majority takes place in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with bits of Mongolia, Russia and Afghanistan as well but I'll be more than happy to stand corrected.
Part 2 is much more straightforward and free flowing historical fiction where it is explained why Naja is in Germany rather than with her own family. It is set in Russia and Kazakhstan as Naja's father volunteers to fight for Germany, a fight he sees as one against Soviet oppression of the Tunshan, subsequently meets Berger the German officer who will become her future foster father and then after Stalingrad has, with Berger, to survive the deprivations of a Soviet prisoner of war camp. This was all well researched and no doubt due to the author's nationality it was a nice touch that it also had an interesting Italian aspect that I was previously unaware of.
Part 3 attempted to close this all off by letting us meet up again with Naja in Cologne and then follow her life there both as child and adult. I think this was trying to tie together her two identities as a Tunshan and as an adopted German but after the intermittent highs of Parts 1 and 2, this was a definite low and far too long and slow.
As previous reviewers have said this is awfully tough book to attach an overall rating to as the three parts of the story differ so much in content, pace and tone. They just about hang together as a whole, but only just. I really enjoyed some of part one but found other sections overly complicated and slow, I then enjoyed part two pretty much throughout but I found part three really dull and ended up skim reading it. So 2.5 to 3 stars as an average.
* For my sins I'm a bit of a pedant in that I always like to know what country a novel is set in but this is difficult here given the nomadic lifestyle and that most of the locations in Part 1 are referred to in non-current geographic terms. That said, I think the majority takes place in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with bits of Mongolia, Russia and Afghanistan as well but I'll be more than happy to stand corrected.
Part 2 is much more straightforward and free flowing historical fiction where it is explained why Naja is in Germany rather than with her own family. It is set in Russia and Kazakhstan as Naja's father volunteers to fight for Germany, a fight he sees as one against Soviet oppression of the Tunshan, subsequently meets Berger the German officer who will become her future foster father and then after Stalingrad has, with Berger, to survive the deprivations of a Soviet prisoner of war camp. This was all well researched and no doubt due to the author's nationality it was a nice touch that it also had an interesting Italian aspect that I was previously unaware of.
Part 3 attempted to close this all off by letting us meet up again with Naja in Cologne and then follow her life there both as child and adult. I think this was trying to tie together her two identities as a Tunshan and as an adopted German but after the intermittent highs of Parts 1 and 2, this was a definite low and far too long and slow.
As previous reviewers have said this is awfully tough book to attach an overall rating to as the three parts of the story differ so much in content, pace and tone. They just about hang together as a whole, but only just. I really enjoyed some of part one but found other sections overly complicated and slow, I then enjoyed part two pretty much throughout but I found part three really dull and ended up skim reading it. So 2.5 to 3 stars as an average.
November 2, 2013
Hard one to rate. It’s in three parts, and my interest was certainly partitioned. Let’s go part by part.
I was transfixed in part one, which is heavy on the ethnography. Be warned, this isn’t the story of a girl so much as the story of her people. Her home society is at an old crossroads: her kin have short Mongol noses or Greek ones they ascribe to Alexander. They are Lamaist, but the lama merges with the shaman and the spirits and rites of several religions mingle in their observances. They call themselves the Tunshan and there are two hundred tents of them left. They trace descent from Sigi Qutuqu (Qutuqtu), foster-brother of Temujin from the far east steppe. With Temujin’s conquest army in the Altai Mountains Sigi looks behind and ahead: is the steppe greener on the other side? Later we see Tamerlane and Toqtamish, the wars with the Oirats. There is a period of women in charge of the tribe because the men have killed themselves off. These tales are the oral history of Naja’s people, transcribed into the novel. Interspersed with this is that nomad girl transplanted – inexplicably to her, and without much explanation to us, either, at first – into a postwar German city. Her discomforts with life in a house are finely imagined, and informed. Whether in her camp life or in this alien environment, description of her experience is visceral. I felt fully entered into this little girl. If you are wary of a child protagonist – I myself am – the telling of the child’s experiences is intensely adult. I dare say the disorientations of the narrative can seem as blown-about as that tumbleweed of the title, but just read and don’t worry.
In part two I met the Turkestan Battalion, with Naja’s father a volunteer for Hitler because of what Stalin had done with the tribes. This had its own ethnographic flavour, with the German army’s management of these local soliders. It then becomes a story of POWs, German and Italian.
Part three had too much modernity for me, with this young woman employed in the telegraph exchange, and less and less of her old home. I only stopped for passages like this: Then, to make me feel better, she said, ‘Don’t be upset. With that nose everyone’s bound to think you’re a Mongol.’ She actually said ‘think you’re a Mongol’ as if I were not really one, and as if the fact of being taken for a Mongol, or the very insinuation that I was one, could constitute an insult.
Your interests may be very different. I get the impression that the war and post-war periods are also studiously detailed, but I skimmed too much to go above three stars.
I was transfixed in part one, which is heavy on the ethnography. Be warned, this isn’t the story of a girl so much as the story of her people. Her home society is at an old crossroads: her kin have short Mongol noses or Greek ones they ascribe to Alexander. They are Lamaist, but the lama merges with the shaman and the spirits and rites of several religions mingle in their observances. They call themselves the Tunshan and there are two hundred tents of them left. They trace descent from Sigi Qutuqu (Qutuqtu), foster-brother of Temujin from the far east steppe. With Temujin’s conquest army in the Altai Mountains Sigi looks behind and ahead: is the steppe greener on the other side? Later we see Tamerlane and Toqtamish, the wars with the Oirats. There is a period of women in charge of the tribe because the men have killed themselves off. These tales are the oral history of Naja’s people, transcribed into the novel. Interspersed with this is that nomad girl transplanted – inexplicably to her, and without much explanation to us, either, at first – into a postwar German city. Her discomforts with life in a house are finely imagined, and informed. Whether in her camp life or in this alien environment, description of her experience is visceral. I felt fully entered into this little girl. If you are wary of a child protagonist – I myself am – the telling of the child’s experiences is intensely adult. I dare say the disorientations of the narrative can seem as blown-about as that tumbleweed of the title, but just read and don’t worry.
In part two I met the Turkestan Battalion, with Naja’s father a volunteer for Hitler because of what Stalin had done with the tribes. This had its own ethnographic flavour, with the German army’s management of these local soliders. It then becomes a story of POWs, German and Italian.
Part three had too much modernity for me, with this young woman employed in the telegraph exchange, and less and less of her old home. I only stopped for passages like this: Then, to make me feel better, she said, ‘Don’t be upset. With that nose everyone’s bound to think you’re a Mongol.’ She actually said ‘think you’re a Mongol’ as if I were not really one, and as if the fact of being taken for a Mongol, or the very insinuation that I was one, could constitute an insult.
Your interests may be very different. I get the impression that the war and post-war periods are also studiously detailed, but I skimmed too much to go above three stars.
March 7, 2015
Nope, I couldn't do it. I tried, really I did, but I just couldn't goad myself into finishing this book. Shame, really, because it had potential, all it needed was some serious editing. I think the biggest problem with this book is that the author just didn't focus enough on telling the main story. She went off on too many tangential story arcs and introduced too many minor characters that had very little bearing on the main storyline. I get that she was trying to provide background information and the characters' backstories, but all she did was bog things down and turn a book that might have been enjoyable into an interminable slog.
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April 18, 2009I hate this book. I think I will be reading it for the rest of my life. I bought it in the airport in Spain because I finished the book I was reading. It's in Spanish but it's about an Asian tribe during the Ghengis Khan era, so there's words that are specific to that culture, which make it so difficult. I read this whenever I feel guilty for not keeping up on my Spanish. Don't read it in Spanish, whatever you do!
August 18, 2016
Loved the first third and moments thereafter—everything that took place on the steppe. The rest is fine so far as it goes, but of no interest to me. I read it to the end, but only to skim what happened. Wonderful for others, no doubt, but not my cup of tea.
March 2, 2007
Interesting characters and highlights from a far-flung culture.
December 25, 2011
I finally finished this book today. It was a belabored tale. Sometimes really lovely but disjointed. I mostly appreciated the look inside the Tanshun people.
November 17, 2012
there are some wonderful descriptive passages here. but the plot trajectory could use improvement.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews