You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
تحكي الرواية عن طبيبة صينية ، يأتيها خبر وفاة زوجها وهو طبيب أيضا، لكن لا جثة ولا توضيحات لظروف موته الغامضة بعد أن أرسل في إحدى كتائب الجيش الصيني ل التبت .. تمضي الطبيبة سنوات طويلة في البحث عنه في هذه البلاد الغريبة بدون أدنى أثر له لكنه تصادف أناسا تبتيين طيبين يقدمون لها ما استطاعوا من عون .. لكن ما السر في العنوان وماذا يعني تعبير جنازة سماوية هذا ما سنعرفه في هذه الرواية المشوقة .
Beautiful.
This is the story of Shu Wen, who joined the army in order to enter Tibet to find her missing husband. She journeyed to Tibet in 1958 and didn’t leave for more than 30 years, by which time China had changed unimaginably. Living with a Tibetan family, she experienced a way of life that just doesn’t exist anymore. This is beautifully told
This is the story of Shu Wen, who joined the army in order to enter Tibet to find her missing husband. She journeyed to Tibet in 1958 and didn’t leave for more than 30 years, by which time China had changed unimaginably. Living with a Tibetan family, she experienced a way of life that just doesn’t exist anymore. This is beautifully told
Sky Burial was a really good book. I honestly wouldn't have read it on my own until I had a task for a couple of different challenges. I went into this book with no expectations because honestly with a title like this.. I was bound to assume all sort of wrong things.
This is a story about Shu Wen. a young newlywed who watches her husband of four long months head off to war. Shortly after that, he's killed and she get's a letter with little to none information about how or why it happened. So she does what any heartbreaking widow would do - she leaves for Tibet to find her justice. She still believes he is actually alive and will leave no stone unturned until she finds out the truth.
Sky Burial,/I> was a beautiful story. It was interesting to see how her years of searching, which is about 30 years, went. The journey she went on and what she was just breathtaking. I ended up loving Shu Wen pretty early on because she had so much faith that her husband was alive. That faith brought her to some foreign place where she wouldn't give up looking for him.
Now even though I ended up loving this story I will admit it did have it's boring parts. Mostly because this book is read more like a diary than anything else.. and I'm kind of iffy about those. However, it's my own fault that I didn't do any research or prepare myself for this type of book or writing style.
Overall, I loved Shu Wen so much that this book definitely deserves four freaking fantastic stars. I'm happy I got to read a new author and that I'm getting one step closer to finish my alphabet author challenge.
This is a story about Shu Wen. a young newlywed who watches her husband of four long months head off to war. Shortly after that, he's killed and she get's a letter with little to none information about how or why it happened. So she does what any heartbreaking widow would do - she leaves for Tibet to find her justice. She still believes he is actually alive and will leave no stone unturned until she finds out the truth.
Sky Burial,/I> was a beautiful story. It was interesting to see how her years of searching, which is about 30 years, went. The journey she went on and what she was just breathtaking. I ended up loving Shu Wen pretty early on because she had so much faith that her husband was alive. That faith brought her to some foreign place where she wouldn't give up looking for him.
Now even though I ended up loving this story I will admit it did have it's boring parts. Mostly because this book is read more like a diary than anything else.. and I'm kind of iffy about those. However, it's my own fault that I didn't do any research or prepare myself for this type of book or writing style.
Overall, I loved Shu Wen so much that this book definitely deserves four freaking fantastic stars. I'm happy I got to read a new author and that I'm getting one step closer to finish my alphabet author challenge.
Xinran tells the true story of a woman who went in search of her new husband in Tibet, refusing to admit that he's dead (like the Chinese government have told her). She will go through anything to try and find him, or at least find out what happened to him. On her journey, the woman joins a Tibetan tribe and through this we learn of how these people live.
A sad but incredible story of love, hope, and endurance. Highly recommend.
A sad but incredible story of love, hope, and endurance. Highly recommend.
During Xinran's radio career she got a tip from a listener to come a visit an old lady who had returned from Tibet and this book was written in response to the two days she spent with Shu Wen talking about her life in Tibet. Shu Wen went into Tibet to look for her husband who was reported dead by his military unit and she ended up living there for 30 or so years. It is a remarkable story of a woman cut loose from all she knows and building a new life with what comes her way.
Translators: Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley (the introduction said they worked with the author to make sure the text made sense to non-Chinese people as well so it's not exactly like the Chinese original)
Translators: Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley (the introduction said they worked with the author to make sure the text made sense to non-Chinese people as well so it's not exactly like the Chinese original)
This book, by the Chinese-British author Xinran, is billed as fiction, though it is apparently based on a true story. I believe it is called fiction because so many of the details of daily life and of conversation rely on research or imagination, but the bare bones of the story—those, I believe, actually happened. But... maybe not. Maybe the introductory note is also fiction. It's impossible to say.
Here's the intro:
In 1994 I was working as a journalist in Nanjing. During the week, I presented a nightly radio program that discussed various aspects of Chinese women's lives. One of my listeners called me from Suzhou to say that he had met a strange woman in the street. They had both been buying rice soup from a street vendor and started talking. The woman had just come back from Tibet. He thought that I might find it interesting to interview her. She was called Shu Wen. He gave me the name of the small hotel where she was staying.
My curiosity awakened, I made the four-hour bus journey from Nanjing to the busy town of Suzhou, which despite modern redevelopment still retains its beauty—its canals, its pretty courtyard houses with their moon gates and decorated eaves, its water gardens, and its ancient tradition of silk making. There, in a teahouse belonging to the small hotel next door, I found an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothing, smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung. Her gray hair hung in two untidy plaits and her skin was lined and weather-beaten. Yet, although she seemed so Tibetan, she had the facial characteristics of a Chinese woman—a small, slightly snub nose, an "apricot mouth." When she began to speak, her accent immediately confirmed to me that she was indeed Chinese. What, then explained her Tibetan appearance?
For two days, I listened to her story. When I returned to Nanjing my head was reeling. I realized that I had just met one of the most exceptional women I would ever know.
I never saw her again, but her story did not leave my mind, so finally I felt I must share it with others.
The story begins in 1956, when Shu Wen is newly—three weeks—married, she and her husband both medical doctors, when her husband is called to service in the army: in Tibet. Two years later, she receives word that he "died in an incident." And she resolves to go find him.
The rest of the book recounts her thirty-plus years living with a nomadic Tibetan family who rescue her and a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma, after her army unit is attacked. Zhuoma, eventually, is kidnapped, and so Wen's task becomes twofold: find both her husband and this woman who became a friend. In the meantime, we learn something about the pastoral Tibetan way of life and spirituality.
It's a spare, straightforward book, nothing especially lyric about the writing. At one point it seems to try to explore the politics of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, and the aggression of the Chinese on Tibet, but it felt ambivalent (or maybe better, without judgment?). The title refers to the ceremony that sends dead people on to their next stage in the reincarnation cycle. It involves vultures.
And spoiler: Wen does find Zhuoma. She also learns what happened to her husband. The last we see of her, she is eating rice soup and talking with a street vendor in Suzhou, a city completely transformed from the one she left thirty-plus years before. I found the resolution, such as it is, unsettling. I wished she would return to the grasslands of Tibet and find the family that had taken her in so many years ago, and be reabsorbed.
Here's the intro:
In 1994 I was working as a journalist in Nanjing. During the week, I presented a nightly radio program that discussed various aspects of Chinese women's lives. One of my listeners called me from Suzhou to say that he had met a strange woman in the street. They had both been buying rice soup from a street vendor and started talking. The woman had just come back from Tibet. He thought that I might find it interesting to interview her. She was called Shu Wen. He gave me the name of the small hotel where she was staying.
My curiosity awakened, I made the four-hour bus journey from Nanjing to the busy town of Suzhou, which despite modern redevelopment still retains its beauty—its canals, its pretty courtyard houses with their moon gates and decorated eaves, its water gardens, and its ancient tradition of silk making. There, in a teahouse belonging to the small hotel next door, I found an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothing, smelling strongly of old leather, rancid milk, and animal dung. Her gray hair hung in two untidy plaits and her skin was lined and weather-beaten. Yet, although she seemed so Tibetan, she had the facial characteristics of a Chinese woman—a small, slightly snub nose, an "apricot mouth." When she began to speak, her accent immediately confirmed to me that she was indeed Chinese. What, then explained her Tibetan appearance?
For two days, I listened to her story. When I returned to Nanjing my head was reeling. I realized that I had just met one of the most exceptional women I would ever know.
I never saw her again, but her story did not leave my mind, so finally I felt I must share it with others.
The story begins in 1956, when Shu Wen is newly—three weeks—married, she and her husband both medical doctors, when her husband is called to service in the army: in Tibet. Two years later, she receives word that he "died in an incident." And she resolves to go find him.
The rest of the book recounts her thirty-plus years living with a nomadic Tibetan family who rescue her and a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma, after her army unit is attacked. Zhuoma, eventually, is kidnapped, and so Wen's task becomes twofold: find both her husband and this woman who became a friend. In the meantime, we learn something about the pastoral Tibetan way of life and spirituality.
It's a spare, straightforward book, nothing especially lyric about the writing. At one point it seems to try to explore the politics of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, and the aggression of the Chinese on Tibet, but it felt ambivalent (or maybe better, without judgment?). The title refers to the ceremony that sends dead people on to their next stage in the reincarnation cycle. It involves vultures.
And spoiler: Wen does find Zhuoma. She also learns what happened to her husband. The last we see of her, she is eating rice soup and talking with a street vendor in Suzhou, a city completely transformed from the one she left thirty-plus years before. I found the resolution, such as it is, unsettling. I wished she would return to the grasslands of Tibet and find the family that had taken her in so many years ago, and be reabsorbed.
Sky Burial on the surface is the biography of a Chinese woman army doctor, Shu Wen, who travels to Tibet in 1958 to investigate the death of her husband. But what Sky Burial really is a wondrously moving story of the spiritual people of Tibet and the historical tension between China and Tibet. Through Shu Wen’s eyes we see the essences of a people as they nurture her and bring her into their fellowship. In 204 pages Xiran has given me an insight into a religion, people, and country that I will carry with me always. Truly loved this book.
adventurous
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Um relato tão extraordinário que em alguns momentos chega até a parecer ficção, Enterro Celestial é uma janela para uma cultura tão distante e tão diferente da nossa que não tem como ser fascinante. Acrescente a isso a perspectiva de uma protagonista que vem de outra cultura distante, com sua resiliência e sensibilidade de tirar o fôlego, e você tem um senhor livro nas mãos.