Review: The Garden of Evening Mists

The Garden of Evening Mists by Twan Eng Tan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This was a truly, truly beautiful book. On the one hand it's a fascinating look into a place and a period of time that no longer exists. On the other hand, it is best described as a meditation on memory and time and love. It's easy to summarize and say that the book is about an English-Speaking Chinese Malayan survivor of a Japanese slave-labor camp in WWII, and how she comes to find some peace in the garden of a man who used to be the Japanese Emperor's gardener. But that does this story no justice.

Yun Ling is suffering from a disorder which will eventually take her thoughts from her. She will be left unable to use words, which is why she finds it important to set down her memories before she loses the ability to do so. The memories, however, seem to me to have been more of a burden to her than anything else. Memories of losing her sister in the camp, memories of her lost love, memories of friends dying. It makes one wonder what life was worth for her. Maybe losing her memories would eventually be a blessing. At the end I wasn't sure if it was a tragedy or not. She ensured that her sister would be remembered by others when she was no longer capable, and perhaps that's more real than living in the memories of one person. Maybe not.

This book is beautifully written, despite not being full of elaborate prose. Sometimes simplicity is best, as realized in the idea of wabi-sabi. I highly recommend this book.



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Review: Beowulf

Beowulf by Unknown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Obviously this is a difficult read, aside from the poem itself. The details of the exact wording the original author (unknown) intended is of course unknowable, but Tolkien, being quite the expert, was attempting to get as close to it as possible. His difficulty arose from having to attempt to translate what the scribe actually wrote, but the scribe was actually less an expert on the original poem or language than Tolkien himself. While this is a good thing for modern-day scholars, for lay-people it gets a bit esoteric and perhaps more involved than we actually want. I'll leave it up to actual scholars to judge Tolkien's accuracy in translation (although there may not be any qualified to argue against the man himself; he certainly wasn't shy about declaring other experts wrong).

As far as the translation of the poem, some will doubtless find it difficult and unnatural, but it captures the cadence and style of the Old English he was attempting to translate. He wanted to make it readable to modern English-speakers, obviously, but he also wanted it to feel transported back to that time. I enjoyed it, others will have to judge for themselves.

This is not a book for people who only loved Lord of the Rings, or especially only loved The Hobbit. If you liked The Silmarillion, this may indeed be a book for you, and for anyone who is a Beowulf scholar of course it's going to be on the menu.



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