"Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?"
This summer, I accidentally ended up in Bruxelles for one night. In the early morning, I waited for a train to take me to Germany where I had planned to go to a concert the same night. As I sat waiting, my guitar apparently caught the interest of a man, who sat down for a small talk. After declining his offers of breakfast, freshly squeezed juice and taking a later train, charming though they all were, I really felt a need to escape the unexpected and somehow always grey adventures of the cities I had been to and sink into something green, calm and uneventful. I went into a bookshop, saw the title and bought this book that I have just put down. It's more like I just ended my stay in a land that I could not bring myself to leave when first planned. Yugiri, The Garden Of Evening Mists, created by malaysian author Tan Twan Eng is a place that can only be unveiled when walking in the mists of painful memories and feelings of injustice and blame. It is the sort of book where not much happens, that is still so easy to sink into, as if it were your own thoughts, or a walk through a beautiful painting, as if having been given access to a secret place in someone's soul that is so full of the present that time seems to stretch and become slower somehow, longer.
"The silence here had a different quality; I felt I had been plumbed with weighted fishing line into a deeper, denser level of the ocean. I stood there, allowing the stillness to seep into me. In the leaves, an unseen bird whistled, deepening the emptiness of the air between each note. Water dripped off the leaves."
When reading the book, I could feel my thoughts as well as my body soften and relax. I could sit back comfortably on my little square on the floor in the crowded train and enjoy the elegant writing and subtle changes of the narrative as if pending between morning and evening in every blink of the eye, as if meditatively moving my feet in a silent waltz with the smoke silhouette of a dream. It's not the sort of book that many will read or that one will remember but it is one that will somehow linger somewhere within the sphere of your own little life.
It's about two individuals surviving the world war II. One, captured and kept in a japanese slave camp, the other a gardener of the japanese emperor whose role in the war remains uncertain throughout the book. It's about the persistent things in life, the core of what is meaningful, the fading and guarding of memories of cruelty, the consequences of knowing that time is knowledge and that the world changes and grows with that insight… I feel that patience is a main message in this book, it is something I hope to be able to write more about later. Patience is easily misunderstood when being named a virtue. It is easier to understand as a palette or a set of strings for the mind, it's the simple source of inspiration. Waiting for patience to settle within is like pulling the curtains aside in the early morning, giving shape, light, colour, sound and motion to your senses…
"Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment of before the wind seals the gap, and the world is in shadows again."
I've grown a bond to this book, but I can't place my finger on what's so good about it other than the elegance and steady pulse of the writing. It is a book I would eagerly recommend but I am not sure to who or why… It's just full of beautiful places and atmospheres, I don't know… I can't wait to receive and read his other book The Gift Of Rain….
