Kuraj
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Descrição da editora
Born in the late 1930s on the Central Asian steppe, Naja is the daughter of a clan chieftain of the Tushan nomads, proud descendants of Genghis Khan. When her fiercely independent father, U'lan, hears of Stalin's plan to bring the Tushan under state control and make them settle permanently in collective farms, he pledges to join forces with the invading German army. It is a pledge of honor that will take her father to the hell of Stalingrad and change Naja's life forever by eventually bringing her, at the age of nine, to ruined postwar Cologne.
From there she must learn to adapt to a strange new culture, and to the strange family that has taken her in. But as Naja gradually grows more comfortable in this alien world, the memories of her young life on the steppe call out to her. She begins a difficult search for her past-and the past of her people-with only the word kuraj (Tushan for tumbleweed) as her talisman and guide.
Silvia di Natale was born in Genoa in 1951 and moved to Germany in 1973, where she lives with her husband and son. She teaches and works as an ethnosociologist. Kuraj is her first novel.
"An extraordinary epic of emigration, capture, ruin, flight and return-a revelation."-Corriere della Sera
"Extraordinary and gripping."-Repubblica
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on a true story, Di Natale's expansive debut chronicles the journey of Naja, a Mongol girl taken from the Central Asian steppes to Cologne, Germany, during WWII. This absorbing if not entirely coherent novel encompasses the far-flung war story that precedes the young heroine's relocation, the details of her alienation in Europe and the cultural history of her nomadic people. When her birth father, Ul'an, a Tunshan khan, joins the Germans in protest of Stalin's collectivization, he meets Lt. G nther Berger, with whom he lays siege to Stalingrad as part of the Turkestan battalion. After the Russians capture and imprison the two men, they escape and return to the steppes, only for Ul'an to die. At Ul'an's behest, G nther adopts the 10-year-old Naja, and with his wife, Siglinde, raises her in his bourgeois German postwar household. As the novel titled after Naja's native word for tumbleweed shifts points of view, time and place, it follows her to middle age, when she comes to familial terms with her adoptive parents and her past. The plot line is original and the writing lyrical, but the number of shifts involved in Naja's journey back to her own identity will leave less diligent readers behind.
