Vlot geschreven, verrijkende kijk op het leven en de geschiedenis van de Mongoolse nomaden, levend 'buiten de wereld', aan de nu turbulente kant van de Russisch-Aziatische zuidgrens. Schat aan antropologische informatie in deel 1, verhelderende info over de betrokkenheid van de nomaden bij Wereldoorlog II en de slag om Stalingrad in deel 2. Rode draad is Naja: opgegroeid in een joert, door de speling van het lot overgeheveld naar Keulen.
Een aanrader voor wie in dergelijke materie geïnteresseerd is, overbodig derde deel. ( )

Hard one to rate. It’s in three parts, and my interest was certainly partitioned. Let’s go part by part.

I was transfixed in part one, which is heavy on the ethnography. Be warned, this isn’t the story of a girl so much as the story of her people. Her home society is at an old crossroads: her kin have short Mongol noses or Greek ones they ascribe to Alexander. They are Lamaist, but the lama merges with the shaman and the spirits and rites of several religions mingle in their observances. They call themselves the Tunshan and there are two hundred tents of them left. They trace descent from Sigi Qutuqu (Qutuqtu), foster-brother of Temujin from the far east steppe. With Temujin’s conquest army in the Altai Mountains Sigi looks behind and ahead: is the steppe greener on the other side? Later we see Tamerlane and Toqtamish, the wars with the Oirats. There is a period of women in charge of the tribe because the men have killed themselves off. These tales are the oral history of Naja’s people, transcribed into the novel. Interspersed with this is that nomad girl transplanted – inexplicably to her, and without much explanation to us, either, at first – into a postwar German city. Her discomforts with life in a house are finely imagined, and informed. Whether in her camp life or in this alien environment, description of her experience is visceral. I felt fully entered into this little girl. If you are wary of a child protagonist – I myself am – the telling of the child’s experiences is intensely adult. I dare say the disorientations of the narrative can seem as blown-about as that tumbleweed of the title, but just read and don’t worry.

In part two I met the Turkestan Battalion, with Naja’s father a volunteer for Hitler because of what Stalin had done with the tribes. This had its own ethnographic flavour, with the German army’s management of these local soliders. It then becomes a story of POWs, German and Italian.

Part three had too much modernity for me, with this young woman employed in the telegraph exchange, and less and less to do with her old home. I only stopped for passages like this: Then, to make me feel better, she said, ‘Don’t be upset. With that nose everyone’s bound to think you’re a Mongol.’ She actually said ‘think you’re a Mongol’ as if I were not really one, and as if the fact of being taken for a Mongol, or the very insinuation that I was one, could constitute an insult.

Your interests may be very different. I get the impression that the war and post-war periods are also studiously detailed, but I skimmed too much to go above three stars. ( )