![]() Part inspired from Jame’s Hilton’s Lost Horizon, partly from Jamyang Norbu’s Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, its influence owing mostly to Kipling adventurism the book is also a discomfiting peek into Steven Seagal’s mercifully shelved Dixie Cup. And although he makes no presumption of indulging Tibetan sensibility at its pivot, the author barely avoids reinforcing Western fantasies upon a country and a people about which his knowledge is, otherwise, substantial. Its plot a germination of an actual event in 1943 involving the crash-landing in Tibet of an American C-87 cargo plane flying the “hump” from China to India, the novel’s narrative rides on several American characters high on Himalayan adventures. If Jamyang Norbu’s Sherlock Holmes novel is a masterful pastiche of a highly reputable genre, Tablet of Gods is a dubious attempt to compress into a linear spreadsheet the story of Tibet’s unfolding entirety. The book, like Jamyang Norbu’s Mandala, while being set in Tibet is not fundamentally a Tibetan novel. Tablet of Gods fails to achieve a convincing microcosm of Tibet’s confounding tapestry in occupation and exile, a universe all by itself that spirals as deep into past as it projects into future. A compelling evidence in story telling, the novel stands out not so much for brilliance of prose or ingenuity of imagination as for the author’s attempt to cover in one ambitious sweep Tibet’s past and present, its mundane and the magnificence. Bueller’s Tablet of the Gods (Paljor Publications, New Delhi) is a welcome fare. ![]() In such fiction-starved scenario as that of Tibetan exile, William M. But Mandala of Sherlock Holmes is not, in a complete sense, a Tibetan novel. As does in non-fiction category, Tsering Shakya’s Dragon in the Land of Snows. Less than a handful of novels constitute their corpus in fiction, among them only Jamyang Norbu’s Mandala of Sherlock Holmes matching in standard, integrity and brilliance to the renown of other established writers. Even after their four decades into exile. The same, sadly, cannot be said about the Tibetans. The Filipino author’s When the Elephants Dance continues its tango on the bestsellers list while several Japanese fictions in English upholds Kurosawa’s legacy in filmmaking. And so Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress earns for its exiled writer France’s highest literary honor, not far behind the Nobel for Gou Xou’s Soul Mountain. The currency of occupation had given way to a weapon of expression.Īnd so Salman Rushdie wins Booker of Bookers for Midnight’s Children, VS Naipaul his Nobel Prize for Literature, unleashing a frenzy so alarming that God of Small Things’ Arundhati Roy complains about Western publishers staging a "job-market" of sort for Indian authors. The same people who had trembled under a foreign tongue now found in it an ideal language with which to chart the map of their being and becoming. Thanks to a fertile legacy in modern institutions left behind by the obsolete empires, a new generation of educated natives began to take roots in the newly freed countries. ![]() This was, however, to change with the de-colonization of the early 20 th century. Imageries that lent themselves to stereotypes, a blurring of truth into fantasy that made of fiction a blackened suspect in the court of literary integrity. Stories of fairy tale on earth, a staple fit for wanderlust: naked fakirs and dancing cobras, Shangri-la and levitating monks, court eunuchs and pigtails dust, mountains and the Great Wall. Indeed, such works have fascinated many a reader back in Europe and America marveling at these unseen worlds – perceptible only on crisp, white pages. Fewer still have escaped imposing patronizing paradigms upon the places and peoples of their narratives, that prison in portraiture to bring down which it would take the native literary-conscience an eternity beyond past - or present, as in the Tibetan case - realities of foreign occupation and oppression. In articulating the exotic, few have achieved that balance between imagination and insight, fantasy and fact, surreal and real. ![]() Western fictionalization of the East makes for a formidable oeuvre, bearing authorships of such diverse genre and generation as Marco Polo, Rudyard Kipling, EM Forster, George Orwell, James Hilton, and now William M Bueller. ![]()
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