Read it in: couple of days

Another one from my last holiday reading spree.  This one was also recommended by my auntie, who knows how much I love Japan.  I also have a deep interest in the atomic bombings, so I was pretty keen to read this one.

But Burnt Shadows isn’t just about the bombing of Hiroshima – that’s only where it starts.  It travels through India, through Pakistan, through Afghanistan and later America.  You do the whole world from the time when everything was separated into axis and allies, right up until now, when everything Middle Eastern is presumed to be in relation with terrorists.  From one broken world to another, with many adventures along the way.

We meet the protagonist on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, where she loses everything.  We then follow her to India where she finds the man she will marry, and they are caught up in the violence as India severs its ties from the British and Pakistan is created.  Later on, her world is changed by the nearby war in Afghanistan.  She is caught up in world event after world event.  It really puts the events into perspective for you.  It’s one thing to see them on television, on the news, but to hear stories of them and the way they’ve changed people’s lives is another.

If anything, this book made me want to learn more languages.  As a student struggling to become fluent in my second language (Japanese) before I can even think about learning others on top of that, I felt very much like a global idiot.  The protagonists of this book can speak three, four, five languages or more.  It makes me so jealous!  But it also shows you what you can do with more than one language.  You can see into other identities, fit into places you wouldn’t otherwise be able to fit into, meet people and speak with people who otherwise wouldn’t talk to you, or say certain things to you.

This book is like an epic.  An epic in less than five-hundred pages.  We go to so many places in such a small amount of time.  Well, at least it felt like a small amount of time to me – who read it in only a couple of days, and at the end of it sat down thinking ‘where am I?’ and walking dazed to the kitchen to get a cup of tea.  Yes, that’s how I usually act when I’ve finished a book.

So, it’s good.  Just take it slowly.  Swallow it carefully and take the time to digest it, don’t follow my example, please.

Read it if you: are interested in the cultures of Japan, or India, or the Middle East, are interested in languages, want to travel this area more, have an interest in modern history, like a read that’s like riding a roller-coaster, like depressing things

While reading listen to: Four Tet Unspoken, Four Tet She Moves She