China-2008

Ein neuer Kosmos

5 von 5 Punkten
Sea of Poppies ist der erste und bisher noch einzige Band einer Trilogie: Um es vorweg zu nehmen, das Warten auf die Folgebände fällt verdammt schwer.
Die herausragende Qualität dieses Werks beschränkt sich nicht auf den perfekt konstruierten Plot, der verschiedenste Charaktere aller Kasten, Schichten, Religionen mit ebenso unterschiedlichen Motiven auf ein Auswandererschiff nach Mauritius zusammenführt. Es ist gleichzeitig ein exzellenter Blick in die Kolonialzeit Britisch-Indiens einschließlich der Opiumkriege mit China, eine in Deutschland weitgehend vergessene Zeit, die weit "globalisierter" war als viele vermuten würden.
Doch keine Sorge, dies ist kein Lehrbuch und auch keiner jener fragwürdigen "historischen Romane", sondern Literatur im besten Sinne. Spannend, berührend, sprachlich höchst anspruchsvoll und trotzdem ein Page-turner, in dem man mit fast allen Charakteren eine empathische Beziehung auf einer ganz menschlichen Ebene aufbaut. Ein großes Buch.

a book that celebrates cosmopolitanism

5 von 5 Punkten
I don't write many reviews, but I really like this book (so much that I feel I owe the author a review).

How does it compare to other books?

I also like "The Glass Palace" and "In an antique land" by the same author, I dislike his "The Hungry Tide". Another recent book I really enjoyed reading - for much the same reasons that I dig "Sea of Poppies"- is Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I think that readers who enjoyed these books will surely enjoy "Sea of Poppies".

What do I like about the book ?

Ghosh writes historical fiction located in South and Southeast Asia. His focus is on people transcending boundaries - of race, nationality, caste, gender - for various reasons: Because they are forced to do so in order to survive, to make a better living, out of curiosity or by sheer concidence. His protagonists are not romantic believers in big ideas, but petty capitalists that would like to make a living.

I like most of Ghosh's books because they seem to mirror the increasingly globalised realities of our (well, at least my) lives today. To me, his characters and their stories seem to have a great relevance and sometimes even similarity to our own lives (or at least, how we imagine them). If you have been abroad as an exchange student or expat, you might feel very familiar with the crew of the Ibis, the ship at the center of Ghosh's novel.

I like his focus on language, especially patois/creole - The English of many characters is deeply imbued by linguistic flotsam and jetsam of probably two dozen languages. Unless you are an expert on antique nautical terms in various languages, you won't understand the exact meaning of every term used in this book - which I think adds greatly to the quality of the book. In most instances the circumstances will allow you to understand what is going on. Critics might say that some of the mariner-slang comes close to Captain Haddock, but such parts are fun to read and I did not buy the book to use it as an historical source.
Ghosh wrote a glossary (nicely integrated into the story), which somehow is not included in the paperback edition I have. You can download it at http://www.amitavghosh.com/latest/ibis_chrestomathy.pdf , if you are scared of not understanding every word in a book.

Best thing about the book: It is a really entertaining page-turner.

What do I dislike?

"The Hungry Tide" sometimes not only bordered on Kitsch - with so much crammed into a book, some of the characters and descriptions became pretty superficial and shallow. I feel that there is less of this in "Sea of Poppies", although it sometimes still feels a little ...hmmm ...fluffy (?), when somebody - even as gifted as Ghosh - tells the story of a mother giving up her only daughter, escaping a widow-burning, shedding her caste-identity, and becoming a leader of a group of émigrés (and more) in a couple of dozen pages.

Ghosh is not Proust or Elfriede Jelinek and literary snobs may ridicule his novels as pretty trashy - but then somehow I feel that Ghosh is relevant to me and Jelinek is not.

Tolles Buch

5 von 5 Punkten
Ein ganz tolles Buch, das man nicht mehr aus der Hand legen möchte, weil es so gut geschrieben ist - auch wenn man manche Ausdrücke in Anglo-Englisch nicht ganz versteht. Sehr empfehlenswert!