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https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/the-devils-dance

The lure of a lost manuscript is one of humanity's eternal temptations. Our ancestor Adam's first poem; the Mushaf of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet; Ibn-Sina's Eastern Logic; Yassawi's secret aphorisms... and these were just the Islamic works. If you included the lost books of other cultures, the list would number thousands, from St Margaret's gospel to the history of Genghis Khan.

Uzbeks have a custom of never calling a scorpion a scorpion: instead, they call it 'the thing with no name'. Was that why they could talk freely about Emirs Nasrullo, Umar and Madali, Shah Dost Muhammad and even Queen Victoria, but wouldn't dare mention his name? The interrogators ... never once let their mouths utter his name. Yet he was the heart and soul, the beginning and the end, of all the things taking place around him.

Abdulla had a game he had invented. When he was going by tram or bus to the city centre, or coming back home towards Xadra Square, he would study the other passengers' faces and imagine them living in different epochs.... Abdulla rarely took his cue from their current profession: the tram driver with the gigantic moustache would be better as a butcher than a cart driver; the ticket inspector with the restless eyes...would have been a pickpocket

It was dark when the car came to a sudden halt and Abdulla lost the thread of his thoughts. They must have arrived at the prison. What had he been thinking about? Oh yes, the five bright-red oranges he hadn't been able to give his children, now left in a house where the lights were out. ... The courtyard was a shade of white tinged with blue, a pure covering still untouched by human feet...

Long overdue wrapup post of my focus on books from Asia in 2019. 2 of 4.

I really noticed the role independent publishers are playing in translating works from other countries (and not pictured are the titles I read from Haymarket, Feminist Press, and more!) A few of these came from subscriptions I have - just complete happenstance that they were putting out titles from countries I was trying to read!

The Devil's Dance by Hamid Ismailov was a challenging read for a number of reasons. It is a story within a story, of the historical 19th Uzbek female poet who is forcibly married to three Khans in a row, as told by Abdulla Qordiriy, an Uzbek writer who has been imprisoned in a Soviet (NKVD) facility in 1938. ⤵️

Uzbekistan “Game of Thrones”...sounds good to me! Just won prize: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/08/first-uzbek-novel-translated-into-...