The Last Quarter of the Moon: Chi Zijian, Bruce Humes: 9780099555650: Amazon.com: Books

The Last Quarter of the Moon: Chi Zijian, Bruce Humes: 9780099555650: Amazon.com: Books

The Last Quarter of the Moon Paperback – International Edition, February 25, 2014
by Chi Zijian (Author), Bruce Humes (Translator)
5.0 out of 5 stars 3 customer reviews

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In this sweeping epic, full of love and loss, a woman from one of the last remote reindeer-herding tribes of northeastern China tells the story of her family and the last century of her country's history. 

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them'.

At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman sits among the birch trees and thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer, living in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

An idyllic childhood playing by the river ends with her father's death and the growing realisation that her mother's and uncle's relationship is not as simple as she thought. Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict which marks the first step towards the end of their isolation...

In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of her tribe but also to the transformation of China.
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Description
`A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them'.

At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman sits among the birch trees and thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer, living in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

An idyllic childhood playing by the river ends with her father's death and the growing realisation that her mother's and uncle's relationship is not as simple as she thought. Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict which marks the first step towards the end of their isolation...

In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of her tribe but also to the transformation of China.

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Editorial Reviews

Review


"Zijian has an extraordinary gift for storytelling and her steely narrator is a true heroine, surviving war and encroaching modernity. Simply magnificent" -- Kate Saunders * Times * 

"An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia - nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries... This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent" * Financial Times * 

"Chi Zijian's beautifully realised novel offers a detailed portrait of a way of life hard to imagine today...It was surely no easy task to make this ancient, wise narrator sound convincing in English. Bruce Humes's skilful translation is pitch-perfect" * Independent *

 "This is a beautifully simple book offering a detailed yet unromantic picture ... The setting is spectacularly rendered and this idyllic corner of China is as prominent as any other character in the book" * We Love This Book *

 "Masterfully told, with simplicity and empathy, in a direct and credible voice that not only feels unlike a translation, but unlike a fiction at all" * Independent on Sunday *

About the Author


CHI ZIJIAN was born in Mohe in 1964. She started writing while at school and had her first story published in Northern Literature magazine when she was at college. She is the only writer to have won the Lu Xun Literary Award three times. The Last Quarter of the Moon also won the Mao Dun Literary Award. Her work has been translated into many languages.

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The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian – review
This epic novel about the nomadic Evenki clan in northern China is an enthralling look at a culture in decline


Jane Housham

Sat 11 Jan 2014 04.11

A way of life under threat … the nomadic Evenki people. Photograph: Alamy


Chi Zijian's epic novel (translated by Bruce Humes) is narrated by a nameless woman of the Evenki people, who have traditionally lived as nomads in the far north of China, on the border with Russia. At first, as the woman looks back over her long, incident-filled life, it's almost impossible to place the events she recounts at fixed points in time. Life continues as it has done for centuries: the Evenki build their birch-bark tepees, tend the reindeer that make life possible in such an extreme climate, celebrate their shamanistic relationship with nature, and live, love and die.

But, as her life wheels through passionate relationships, the births of her children, the deaths of more and more family members (such abundant and varied deaths!), gradually events intrude which start to pinpoint time.

Japan invades China; the Chinese go to war with Russia. Increasingly, military and industrial activity impinges on the timeless world of the Evenki, and they are powerless to fend it off. By the time the narrator's life has been brought more or less up to date, one senses that their culture, so enthrallingly evoked, is doomed.