APRIL'S BOOK: BURMA
What does it mean to be ‘from’ somewhere? How stubbornly do roots cling to the soul? In a novel that ranges from the primitive hill villages of Burma to the brothels of Thailand and the wild west of China, novelist Wendy Law-yone writes a lament for her homeland of Burma and an inspirational story about the tenacity of the human spirit.
Click through to read an extract or tell us what you think of this remarkable novel.
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: BURMA
Novelist Wendy Law-yone picks 5 books that paint a picture of Burma
Golden Earth (1959) by Norman Lewis
Lewis has always been one of my favourite travel writers, and Golden Earth ranks as my top choice of books about travel in Burma. Every time I pick it up to reread a section at random, I am reassured that it’s as good as I remember it to be, and still the best on the subject – although it was written shortly before the military took over, when it was still possible for a foreigner to roam about in relative freedom, and to talk to ordinary people without fear of landing them, or himself, in jail. [Publisher: Eland Books]
Beyond the Last Village (2003) by Alan Rabinowitz
While working under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Rabinowitz, an American zoologist, managed in 1993 to gain permission from the Burmese government to lead a scientific expedition into one of the most isolated and forbidding regions of the country, in the southeast foothills of the Himalayas. In the course of surveying the flora and fauna of this near-mythic territory (his goal was to establish a wildlife conservation program within a national park) Rabinowitz discovered no less than four as yet unclassified mammals – including a species of deer completely new to science – and came across such solitary peoples as the world’s only Asian pygmies, and a tribe on the very brink of extinction from in-breeding. An enthralling journey of discovery in the most consequential sense. [Publisher: Island Press, Washington, DC]
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009) by James C. Scott.
The Burmese uplands figure prominently in this imaginative and elegant study of the hill-dwelling ethnic minorities of the Southeast Asian mainland massif (also known as Zomia) as runaway, fugitive communities long dedicated to staying out of the reach of the central state. An unorthodox and exciting history that sheds light on a significant population and their immemorial quest for self-determination.
[Publisher: Yale University Press]
Burma Chronicles (2009) by Guy Delisle.
A Western graphic novel set in Burma? Yes. And spot on, too. Guy Delisle is a Canadian artist whose wife, a Médicins sans Frontières doctor, was posted to Burma for a year. Delisle’s comic-strip travelogue captures with economy and wit the difficulties and oddities of life for a stay-at-home dad, and a foreigner at that, in Rangoon. A remarkably vivid picture of the expatriate community in that bizarre police state. [Publisher: Jonathan Cape]
Land of the Great Image (1943) by Maurice Collis
An ICS man who was educated at Rugby and Oxford, Collis spent twenty years in Burma, ending up as District Magistrate of Rangoon. Of his many books – still widely read and admired – my personal favourite is this quirky and slightly creepy account of Friar Manrique’s misadventures in Arakan (now known as Rakhine), on the western coast. Manrique was a Portuguese Augustinian missionary whose curse it was to get embroiled in the intrigues of a seventeenth-century Burmese court. Those curious to understand the delusions of divinity shared by the country’s current leaders will be both entertained and enlightened by this book. [Publisher: New Directions]