Red Poppies, by Alai
(translated by Howard Goldblatt [& Sylvia Li-chun Lin???])
Penguin Books, India, New Delhi, 2002
416 pages, ISBN: 0-14-302849-9. (INR 295)
Reviewed by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath
Red Poppies is a deceptively simple novel. We get sentences such as "I am an idiot" standing alone as paragraphs and descriptions of a girl's breasts as "a pair of frightened little rabbits". But just as the supposed idiocy of the narrator contrasts with his flashes of wisdom, so there is an intentional dissonance in the politics, allusions, style and opinions of the author, Alai. If at first this seems just a crazy tale of love and war in the feudal highlands, the story insidiously works its way into being the contemporary masterpiece of Tibetan literature.
The recognition of literature from this otherwise immensely popular part of the world as exactly that, literature – not journalism, political commentary, religious text or human-interest story – does not come easy. This difficulty certainly has to do with a relative lack of Tibetan fiction (written in any language) but it also has to do with an emphasis on the religious, historical and political over the literary. In Kathmandu, the book, which was completely sold out in its hardback version at major bookstores in Oxford, London, Boston and New York, did not elicit any recognition from the normally knowledgeable manager of a bookstore specialising in things Tibetan. At last she vaguely recollected some new novel that was tucked into a small shelf in the back with a few East Asian paperbacks, Sorrows of War, Wild Swans and Shanghai Baby. For most people, including the bookstore proprietor, Tibet and novels just do not go together, even less so if the novel has been written in Chinese.