Juliette de Bairacli Levy

Juliette, born in 1912 of Egyptian and Turkish Jews, in Manchester, England, was brought up in wealthy circumstances. When the puppies her father brought her sickened and died, she decided to become a veterinarian and was sent to the universities in Liverpool and Manchester. But she was horrified at the vivisection and other experiments on animals, so she left. She determined that the best way to learn how to treat animals was to live among those who raised them in natural ways. Like Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy,” she “one summer-morn forsook her friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore, and roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood.”

Juliette began traveling, learning and working, gathering herbal remedies from America, Spain, France, North Africa and Turkey. She loved especially the herbivorous creatures, sheep, goats, cows, horses, camels and wild deer. She was certain that these creatures knew and ate what they needed to stay healthy. She held a distemper clinic for dogs in London in the 1930’s and was credited with curing many sheep of black scour, feeding them herbs, milk and molasses.

From Edmond Szekely, a Hungarian doctor at Rancho La Puerta near San Diego, Juliette learned that, in human health, the whole body must be treated, not just the local symptoms of a disease. Fasting and herbs were often among the remedies. From nomads, Gypsies and peasants, she learned herbal remedies and the “simple laws of health and happiness.”

After much travel and learning, Juliette published a Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable in England in 1952. Before this, knowledge had only been passed down verbally. She met her husband, Francisco Lancha Dominguez in Spain and they had two children, Rafik and Luz. But Juliette found she could not live in cities, whereas her husband “could not get used to the country life. We warred much concerning this. He thought that it was madness on my part to choose to be alone in an old mill in the Spanish Sierra Nevada for the birth of our second child, and not with him in Tetuan,” where he was a journalist.

Juliette with her baby, right

Juliette lived for a while in the New Forest in England, but then returned to the Mediterranean, where she made homes and gardens for herself and her children in abandoned places, protected by beloved Afghan hounds. She wrote several generous books about her travels and mode of living, particularly Traveler’s Joy, which became a beacon of light for people in the 1970’s who were looking for ways of living closer to nature. We knew that Juliette had lived the life of which she wrote. In America, she gave workshops and seminars on herbal medicine, becoming known as the grandmother of the herbal renaissance.

Juliette’s writing is rich with her love of flowers, herbs and animals. She describes the people she meets and lives with, as well as the insects and rodents and salamanders. In the spring, in the Sierra Nevada in Spain she writes: “I could not forgo our walks despite the snow and rain, for all the terraced slopes of the fertile lower areas of the sierra were in blossom. Fruit trees of every kind seemed as multitudinous as the sierra animals, and the blossom lay lovely upon them, of all colors of white and pink, from the ivory of pear flowers to the darker rose hue of quince and almond, to the green-white, most fragrant blossoms of the orange and lemon trees. Trees in blossom, seen against a turquoise sky when the rains clear, are a fair thing. And later, the carmine of pomegranate flowers against the blue was the loveliest of all.”

In the 1990’s Tish Streeten began filming Juliette, making a documentary entitled Juliette of the Herbs. The film tells Juliette’s biography, but also has much footage of her in the home and garden she made on Kythera, an island off Greece. Juliette’s distinctive voice describes what she has learned in a long, brave life. “The main purpose of having a garden is to have the garden as a teacher and friend. If you have a problem then the garden will give you the plants you need. You are always learning from your garden. I’ve had ten gardens and miss them all,” she says. Clips from this beautiful film can be found here.

Juliette died peacefully in 2009 at the age of 96, in Switzerland, where she lived near her daughter. Her legacy has been preserved and most of her books are still in print. Two of my sisters were herbalists and Gypsy lovers, much inspired by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. I myself, though more scholar than Gypsy, cling to the aesthetics of the natural life and the fine example of health and happiness Juliette set before us.

Bathsheba Everdene

When we first meet Bathsheba Everdene, she is a spirited country girl, thrilled with the life around her and excited by her own independence. To the amusement of Gabriel Oak, a farmer with sheep and dogs, she takes a looking glass from her bag while waiting for the carter who is taking her to her aunt. The two meet several times and she saves him from suffocation one cold night. But when he asks her, she doesn’t see any reason to marry. She hardly knows him.

Carey Mulligan, Far From the Madding Crowd 2015

Thomas Hardy, in Far From the Madding Crowd, first serialized in Cornhill magazine in 1874, soon endows Bathsheba with an inheritance that sets her apart and makes her more of a personage in the eyes of her small society. She is only 22, but she dismisses her bailiff for thieving and tells her men, “I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.” By this time, Gabriel Oak is among them, having lost his sheep. Their circumstances have changed entirely.

When Bathsheba goes to the corn exchange to sell her corn, the farmers are surprised by her. But one rich neighbor, Mr. Boldwood, ignores her. This piques Bathsheba’s interest. With one of her maids, she playfully sends him a valentine, which she soon regrets. Bathsheba is “a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein her heart was not involved,” says Hardy. She values Gabriel Oak’s opinion most, and when she asks him what he thinks of this prank, he tells her honestly. She dismisses him, but when her sheep get into the clover and are about to die of bloat, she is told Gabriel is the only one who can save them. She begs him to come back and he does.

Gabriel no longer expects to marry Bathsheba. Hardy says, “Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst.” When he supervises the shearing, Bathsheba watches. “That his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough” for him. He allows himself to be displaced by Boldwood at the shearing supper. Both he and Boldwood are horrified however, when Bathsheba succumbs to the flattery of a young soldier, Frank Troy. Boldwood threatens Troy and Bathsheba goes to the town where his regiment is to break off with him, ending up marrying him instead.

Both Boldwood and Gabriel Oak are aware that Troy meant to marry a young woman named Fanny Robin, who was a maid on Bathsheba’s farm. As the husband of Bathsheba, Troy squanders her money on racing and gets the farmhands drunk at a harvest supper. It is a stormy night and Gabriel Oak is left to try to cover the ricks full of grain. Bathsheba comes out to help him. “Thank you for your devotion a thousand times, Gabriel! Good night – I know you are doing your very best for me.”

When Fanny Robin dies, her coffin is brought to Bathsheba’s farm. Wondering about the stories she has heard, Bathsheba opens it and sees inside the baby that died with her. Troy comes home and finds her, telling Bathsheba that this dead woman is more to him than she will ever be. Troy spends his last money on a large tombstone for Fanny and jumps into the sea. His clothes are found on the shore and everyone assumes he has drowned.

A year later, Boldwood hopes that Bathsheba will again look in his direction and begs her to promise that she will marry him in six years, when Troy is declared dead. But Troy is not dead. He returns the night that Boldwood gives a Christmas party, hoping for Bathsheba’s positive answer. Troy grabs for Bathsheba’s hand, she screams and Boldwood shoots him. Bathsheba buries Troy next to Fanny Robin. Boldwood goes straight to the police, but he is not to be hanged as his neighbors point out his insanity. He will serve a prison sentence “at the Queen’s pleasure.”

At last free of any constraint, Bathsheba notices that Gabriel Oak, who now possesses part of Boldwood’s farm, shuns her. In fact, he tells her he is planning to leave for California. When she asks why, he says it is to protect her good name, as people are beginning to talk about them. In the end they agree together. “Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.” They marry in the “most private, secret, plainest” wedding.

I love Thomas Hardy. No other writer describes country life so masterfully. In spring he says, “the vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.” Amen to that! He also provides a thick panorama of country life and a Greek chorus of people to comment on the action.

Most Hardy heroines end up victims of fate or their own passions, or of cruel society. Bathsheba Everdene is a vain beauty, skittish, practical, and impulsive. She makes mistakes, but redeems herself by her steadfast trust in and friendship for Gabriel Oak, who loves her beyond all contrariness. In this story, Margaret Drabble says, Hardy found a way of displaying “the sense of tragic and cosmic grandeur that was to distinguish his mature work.” To my mind Bathsheba is delightfully embodied by Carey Mulligan in the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s 2015 screen adaptation.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet, born in 1911. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother was institutionalized shortly thereafter. Elizabeth lived with her mother’s parents in Nova Scotia, but was soon brought to live with her father’s wealthier side of the family in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was unhappy and developed chronic asthma, so she was sent to live with an aunt in a less well-off, immigrant neighborhood. Often ill, she didn’t get much formal schooling. By the time she arrived at Vassar, however, it was obvious she was a gifted and gutsy young woman, founding a literary magazine with others of her graduating class of 1934.

After graduation, Bishop settled in New York. She had enough inherited income that she did not need to work. She met Marianne Moore, whose observant poetry influenced her deeply. Ms. Moore insured that Bishop’s poems began to be published. Bishop briefly worked as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and knew many of the poets working at the same time as she. Robert Lowell once considered proposing to her. They did not see each other a lot, but kept up an affectionate correspondence throughout his life.

Bishop found that travel helped mitigate the restlessness she had developed due to the insecurity of her childhood. This insecurity also led to alcoholism, which Bishop tried to hide, but was never able to conquer. In 1937 she traveled in Europe with Louise Crane. When they came back to the United States, they lived together in Key West. Bishop bought a house there and stayed for nearly ten years.

Because of her love of natural history and Darwin, Bishop used a travel fellowship to go to South America in 1951. She didn’t mean to stay long, but she met the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she developed a relationship. Soares built Bishop a studio on her property, called Samambaia, outside of Rio. In 1956, on a trip to New York, Bishop and Soares returned to Brazil a month early. “I really can’t bear much American life these days,” she wrote. “Surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.” In Brazil, she said, they lived in a “state of broken-down luxury.” Bishop said she was happier in Brazil than she had ever been.

Bishop’s work centered on observation, accuracy, care. She did not publish a great deal, leaving some things unfinished. “It is a question of using the poet’s proper materials … to express something spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order … The other way, of using the supposedly ‘spiritual’ – the beautiful, the nostalgic, the ideal and poetic, to produce the material – is the way of the romantic – a great perversity.”

After the death of Soares, Bishop taught at various American universities, including Harvard, NYU and MIT. She lived and traveled with Alice Methfessel, who acted as her assistant. She died in 1979 of a brain aneurysm. James Merrill said of her work that it was “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime.” He also spoke of “her instinctive, modest, life-long impersonation of an ordinary woman.”

Elizabeth Bishop was a person after my own heart, reticent, observant, classical in her approach and desperately wanting to be a good person despite fighting asthma, depression and alcoholism. Because of her I recently read Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and doubled-down on my own belief in how deeply spirit is embodied in matter itself.

In her famous villanelle “One Art,” Bishop writes that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Her biographer Brett Millier [Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory of It, 1992] points out that “in the writing of such a disciplined, demanding poem lies the mastery of the loss. Working through each of her losses … is the way to overcome them, or, if not to overcome them, then to see the way in which she might possibly master herself.”

Sachiko Makioka

Few 20^th century heroines are as attractive as Sachiko Makioka. Though little happens to her in The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki [serialized in Japan between 1943 and 1948], everything that befalls her sisters is referred to her, as no one else has the understanding and tact which Sachiko has. There is a reason for this. Sachiko is a portrait of Tanizaki’s own beloved wife. Since Tanizaki was a writer of great power, a deep imprint of his wife and her sisters and their complex world view emerges.

The Makioka Sisters, 1983 movie

The Makioka Sisters tells the story of Yukiko, the third sister in the family, who is in need of a husband. The family was once very wealthy and respected, but when their father dies, their fortunes slip. Yukiko is the least modern of the sisters, wearing restrained Japanese clothes. She seems compliant in the search for a suitor, but she can be stiff-necked when it comes to actual acceptance. After meeting them, the family rejects one suitor because they believe his mother has an inheritable disease, and another because he is a widow and Yukiko thinks him unfeeling because he showed her a photo of his wife and children. Another suitor rejects Yukiko because she is so shy.

Finding a husband for Yukiko is complicated by Taeko, the fourth sister, who is at once the most modern and something of a rebel. Very young, she runs off with a male friend. When she is brought back, she settles down, but plans to marry this young man as soon as Yukiko has married. Taeko is very good with her hands and makes dolls, which she sells. She also enjoys sewing and hopes to make money at it. But she becomes entangled with one man after another to the point that she is disinherited by the Makiokas.

Sachiko herself was the favorite of her father. When the three younger sisters go out together, Sachiko appears to be exactly between Yukiko’s old-fashioned restraint and Taeko’s exuberance. Sachiko is sometimes asked not to come when Yukiko is to meet a suitor because her own modern and lively beauty overshadows her younger sister. Sachiko is married to an accountant, who was adopted into the family and took their name. He is very proud of his wife and involves himself in all of the Makioka affairs. The two have a daughter and are saddened when Sachiko has a miscarriage.

The events in The Makioka Sisters reflect Japan’s situation between 1936 and 1941. The book is mainly set in the suburbs of Osaka, where the sisters grew up. For Tanizaki, Osaka’s integration of tradition, beauty and cosmopolitanism compares favorably to Tokyo’s ugliness and disorder. Every sentence in the book describes the fine discriminations the sisters make in their choices and ideas. The Makiokas make friends with both Russians and Germans living near them. They talk to each other on the telephone, take trains to see their eldest sister in Tokyo and go to restaurants. Graphic discussion of several illnesses and hospital procedures increases the sense of utter modernity.

But the Makiokas also do not miss opportunities for concerts, dances, and rituals. Each spring they go to Kyoto for the cherry blossoms. There are cherry trees everywhere, but Sachiko does not feel she has seen blossoms at all unless she sees them in Kyoto. One spring while they are strolling along the banks of Hirosawa Pond, a photographer asks to take a photo of the three sisters and Sachiko’s daughter. “Ever since, they had made it a point to stand under the same tree and look out over the pond, and have their picture taken … those cherries said to be famous even abroad – how would they be this year? Was it perhaps already too late? Always they stepped through the gallery with a strange rising of the heart, but the five of them cried out as one when they saw that cloud of pink spread across the late afternoon sky.”

As the story of the Makioka sisters continues, Sachiko cannot reject her sister Taeko, who becomes pregnant and then moves in with a bartender. Sachiko feels she must take some of the responsibility for not watching over her sister more closely. When Taeko needs a good talking-to, it is Yukiko who gives it to her. And Yukiko does succeed in making a match with an interesting man, an architect. They meet in Kyoto and Yukiko accepts the proposal. At the end of the story, she is preparing the wig and kimono for her wedding. Sachiko thinks of how still the house will be without her two sisters.

It is Sachiko’s love for her difficult sisters, her husband and child which animates her portrait. The other fascinating thing about this story is the panorama which detailed description of ordinary life presents. It is so open-ended and without precedent. One thing follows another, all of it completely authentic in feel. In translation by Edward Seidensticker, the story of Sachiko Makioka is riveting.

Hadley Richardson

Ernest, Hadley, Jack, Austria 1925

Though I have loved Ernest Hemingway’s writing since I was a young person, I have never been able to see any of his female characters as exemplary. I am not sure he was interested in them. It has become clear, however, that the female character he made the most of was Hadley, his first wife. She emerges in A Moveable Feast [1964], the posthumously published story of Hemingway’s early years in Paris. Recently the reality of Hadley has slipped out beyond the mythology, into a history of her own.

Hadley Richardson was born in 1891, eight years ahead of Hemingway, whom she married in 1921. With Hadley’s small inheritance and money from Hemingway’s journalism, the couple moved to Paris almost immediately. The iconic stories of their meetings with other expatriates, their expeditions into the mountains skiing, into Spain and Italy for fishing and bullfighting and Hemingway’s determination to forge an American style of writing form the background of their early years together. “We liked the hurly and burly and it was the best time I had in my life, no comparison,” Hadley told Alice Sokoloff.

Hemingway began to be courted by those who saw his great charisma and the possibility of his fame. Pauline Pfeiffer became obsessed with him. Pauline was aggressive, joining the Hemingways in the mountains and on the Rivera. She was the opposite of Hadley, but Hemingway enjoyed her style and her money. He felt he was in love with both of them. Hemingway’s breakout novel The Sun Also Rises about a trip to Pamplona they all shared in 1925 was written under the influence of this complex love.

After a year of trying to accommodate a difficult ménage a trois, Hadley requested a separation and, in the fall of 1926, a divorce. She was given custody of their son Jack, whom she took back to visit relatives in the United States in the summer of 1927. In accounts of the summer, Hadley said she felt “free as air,” after the previous miserable one. Living with Hemingway was a “great responsibility,” and she was tired of the intensity. “I was not fit for competition,” she says.

Hadley returned to Paris and her many friends, among whom were Julia Child and the journalist and poet Paul Mowrer. She married Mowrer in 1933 in London. During the Second World War, her son Jack Hemingway served with honor and became a prisoner of war. Hadley and Paul went back and forth between Europe and America, but when he retired from journalism in 1949, they lived in New Hampshire where Hadley worked as a part-time librarian.

As he looked back and deconstructed his life, Hemingway believed Hadley had been the love of his life. His idolization of her in A Moveable Feast has recently been confirmed in a book published by A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway in Love, His Own Story. Hemingway tells Hotchner he once ran into Hadley in Paris, telling her, “You’ll be the true part of any woman I write about. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for you.” His last words to Hotchner, who leaves him in a hospital room in Rochester, Minnesota, weeks before his death are: “How does a young man know when he falls in love for the very first time, how can he know that it will be the only true love of his life?”

Hadley Richardson looked back at things differently. Asked if she would have gone back if she could have, Hadley says “No, I think I wanted something real.” Paul Mowrer made her very happy, she says. The series of interviews conducted by Alice Sokoloff in 1971 and 1972, in which one can hear Hadley’s own voice, are available in clips here.

To me, Hadley Richardson exemplifies the kind of femininity which is a whole-hearted response to the life which comes to her. Sheltered by her family, she is timid when she gets to Paris, but “I was ready to go. I was a very excited young woman. I discovered that I was alive,” she tells Alice Sokoloff. The grace with which she left Hemingway, slipping into the background and a life of her own, also illustrates her fine character. She continued to love Hemingway in her way and was grateful to him for the life they had shared in Paris. As she looks back at her own memories, she hasn’t a bad word for anyone.

Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe by Ansel Adams, 1937

Everyone thinks they know the story of Georgia O’Keeffe. It is only when you learn the actual details that you find she was not the iconic, forbidding, independent artist shown in later photographs of her. Bemused by her success, O’Keeffe felt that she had been lucky and at different points in her life it would have been hard to imagine the stature she achieved.

O’Keeffe was the oldest in a family of seven, born in Wisconsin. Her parents sold off their farm and moved the family to Williamsburg, Virginia, hoping to improve their chances, but they were never able to penetrate the Southern culture and family fortunes began to fall. O’Keeffe was certain she wanted to be an artist very early. She received some excellent education but it was sporadic, and partly because of her poverty, O’Keeffe was always an outsider.

Offered a teaching job in Amarillo, Texas, O’Keeffe took it. “The Wild West, you see. I was beside myself. The openness. The dry landscape. The beauty of that wild world,” Georgia later said. She then taught in South Carolina where she had enough free time to work out her own ideas about art but also enjoyed relationships with men. This time of working quickly on charcoal drawings without censoring her ideas or gestures, often verging on abstraction, was crucial. She sent some to a friend, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a New York gallery owner, influential by virtue of the clarity of his judgments and his desire to find in America the kind of art that was invigorating Europe.

O’Keeffe met Stieglitz in New York, and when she went back to teaching at a college in Canyon, Texas, they wrote to each other. By this time, O’Keeffe’s mother had died and her father disappeared. O’Keeffe took her 17-year-old sister to Texas with her. She was not understood at the college, but Stieglitz mounted her first small show at his gallery. A critic wrote: “Miss O’Keeffe has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism for what every woman knows, but what women heretofore have kept to themselves.”

When O’Keeffe contracted the flu in 1918 she had to take a leave of absence. As she was without funds or help, Stieglitz sent for her. When she arrived, still sick, he installed her in his niece’s studio and began to photograph her, often nude. Stieglitz had been unhappily married for many years, and he and Georgia became lovers despite the fact that he was 54 and she 30. Stieglitz mother, the matriarch of their large family, summoned them both to the family’s summer home on Lake George.

O’Keeffe continued to work and live with Stieglitz, in New York during the winter, and at the crowded family Victorian on the lake in the summer. Stieglitz did everything possible to allow Georgia to paint. He showed his photographs of O’Keeffe at his gallery and then her paintings. The response to the photographs colored the critics interest in O’Keeffe’s paintings, insisting on her intuitive femininity, while Georgia tried to emphasize the intellectual and technical underpinning of her work. Interest in her did help sell paintings however!

O’Keeffe and Stieglitz married in 1924, but their differences soon began to pull them apart. O’Keeffe was exhausted by Stieglitz’ outgoing personality. He was constantly talking and surrounded by people. She accepted an invitation to visit New Mexico in 1929, staying four months and having a wonderful time. Because she was no longer willing to pose nude, Stieglitz found other women to do so. Dorothy Norman, much younger, but also married, became a partner to Stieglitz both in his gallery and intimately, a relationship which continued throughout his life. O’Keeffe endured this, but had a nervous breakdown in 1932. For almost three years she painted little.

What saved O’Keeffe was falling in love with a place far from New York, the remote country of northern New Mexico. She continued to spend winters in New York, caring for her aging husband, but spent her summers mostly in the Southwest. Steiglitz had driven the prices of her work high enough that they were very well off. O’Keeffe could afford both a New York apartment for the two of them and the purchase of an adobe at Ghost Ranch. She continued to paint and the Museum of Modern Art held a large retrospective of her work in 1946, the year in which Stieglitz died.

O'Keeffe by Christopher Springmann, 1974

After his death O’Keeffe spent several years working with Stieglitz’ photographs, letters and papers, finding academic homes for them. She also purchased another, less remote house in Abiquiu and had it renovated, moving there permanently. She lived simply, but very carefully, making art out of her surroundings. As she grew older a staff helped with her gardens and housekeeping, as well as the stretching of canvases, her recordkeeping and correspondence. By this time she was able to direct her public image and made sure that a picture of fierce independence and indomitable will to paint dominated. She and her home were widely photographed and her paintings commanded increasingly high prices.

O’Keeffe hid the fact that she was losing her vision as she aged. She came to rely on a young man, Juan Hamilton, for safety and certainty in the last decade of her life, though she was close to her sisters and continued to travel. She died in 1986 and Hamilton spread her ashes over her beloved Pedernal, the mesa she could see from her home.

Because O’Keeffe’s work and her story unfolded during my lifetime, I was very aware of her. Her simplicity and austerity resonated strongly with my own ways of living, though I would probably see more in her paintings if I were an art student. I relish the paradoxical sense of O'Keeffe's fierceness and tenderness as a woman. I first read the excellent Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life by Roxana Robinson [1989] and, as more letters and documents have become available, even more detail is filled in by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe[2004].

E Zhong d’Ampere

Chinese Woman, 1950s, Marc Riboud

Dai Sijie’s Once on a Moonless Night [first published in France, 2007] purports to be about a mutilated manuscript, torn in two and thrown from a Japanese plane by China’s last emporer, PuYi. An unnamed French girl narrates the story about her love for Tumchooq, a greengrocer with whom she falls in love with in Peking in about 1978. In reality, their love mirrors the more disastrous meeting of Tumchooq’s parents, who are torn apart by the Chinese government’s desire for the manuscript which they own. For me, the most important character in the book is Tumchooq’s mother, E (the word for the silkworm moth) Zhong.

Tumchooq is put in reform school because he leaves for dead the friend who has just told him the standard gossip: “your father sold your pregnant mother to a poet for the mutiliated manuscript.” While in this school, his mother writes down his father’s name, sobbing so much she cannot say it: Paul d’Ampere, a famous French linguist and writer of notes on Marco Polo’s book about the wonders of the world.

For his crime, Paul d’Ampere was sent to the horrifying mines at Ya An near Chengdu before his son was born. Tumchooq first meets him in 1975 when he travels to the prison camp at Ya An, an area which had been the site of such famine that between 1959 and 1961 more than a million people died.

Tumchooq’s mother is the granddaughter of a promising favorite of Cixi, the dowager empress who ruled and controlled the succession of rulers of China for 47 years until her death in 1908. To Tumchooq, his mother is the most beautiful woman in Peking. She works as an assistant curator of a museum within the Forbidden City. Tumchooq tells the narrator about his background, about the pieces of his life he is struggling to put together. He remembers finding the pipa, or lute, which his mother or father had played, hidden among the roof trusses of his house. According to a story which Tumchooq’s mother would never tell him, she had fallen in love with his father when he played the pipa even more beautifully than she did.

Tumchooq also tells the narrator of the singing sands of Manchuria, where he was taken by this mother at four, dressed as a prince to greet his great-grandfather. And of the times his mother and he picked fruit from a fig tree near her office in the Forbidden City at the office of the Imperial Archives. Playing with him, she radiated a “volcanic youthfulness.”

Visiting his father, Tumchooq learns of his father’s friendship with the historical prisoner Hu Feng, a writer and intellectual condemned by Mao himself. Paul d’Ampere teaches Hu Feng, who has been losing his mind, an esoteric language. Wearing a sheepskin jerkin on the inside of which d’Ampere has copied the half of the sutra he knows, the two men play oral chess in the dark. D’Ampere tells Tumchooq that he too will probably pursue the other half of the mutilated manuscript. When d’Ampere is killed by a lynch mob at the camp, Tumchooq buries him and refuses to return to Peking or to ever speak Chinese again.

Abandoned, the narrator aborts the child she has conceived with Tumchooq and goes back to France. But she cannot forget Tumchooq. Eventually she goes to Pagan, Myanmar, where at one time there were 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries. At a monastery she finds notes that Tumchooq has made. He had come to see whether he could find, among the texts of the Hinayana school of thought, the complete fable of the mutilated manuscript. When the narrator arrives, Tumchooq is in Japan, soon to return, except that he is arrested for having a false passport and deported to Laos.

The narrator must go to Peking to find Tumchooq’s mother and establish his correct identity. She overhears the mutilated manuscript being discussed and finds that the Chinese government has quietly purchased the lost half. She is able to see a slide of it and complete the fable. More importantly, she learns something regarding Tumchooq’s mother: “A beautiful woman, elegant and aristocratic-looking, who withdrew into a sort of perpetual widowhood out of guilt for her husband, whom the authorities had forced her to accuse. According to Mr. Xu, she was given the choice between charging him with a crime he’d never committed or losing the child she was carrying.”

Dai Sijie has become a master at telling the horrifying, yet utterly compelling stories of 20^th century China. Here, in a shyly told narrative, we find at base the story of a family, knit together by its complex heritage. Dai Sijie leaves us to imagine what happens, but I am left with the feeling that, amid the sacrifices and pain, some preserved the lush, sensual life, in memory and language, from which China’s ancient culture developed.