DISCOVERIES

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Sky Burial

An Epic Love Story of Tibet

Xinran, translated from the Chinese by Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 207 pp., $18.95

In a Tibetan sky burial, “the corpse [is] cut into pieces and left on a mountain altar for the vultures to eat.” It is a “manifestation of the harmony in Tibet between heaven and earth.”

In 1994, Xinran, a Nanjing journalist, acting on a tip from a stranger, interviewed a woman named Shu Wen, a doctor who had lived in Tibet for more than 30 years. Shu Wen’s husband, also a doctor, had gone there in 1958 with the People’s Liberation Army. They had been married for less than 100 days when she heard he had been killed. Believing him still alive, Shu Wen, 26, joined the army (which was greatly in need of doctors) and went to Tibet to find him.

She befriended a prisoner of war, a young aristocratic Tibetan woman; the two fled and were taken in by a family of herdsmen. They became her family; from them she learned about Buddhism, Tibetan medicine, how to live close to nature. Years later, she met a hermit who had witnessed her husband’s death and had received from him a journal of his last weeks, with instructions to give it to his wife. Shu Wen learned that her husband had interrupted a mass sky burial to save the hermit, who was still alive. To avoid certain revenge on his unit, and to prove to the angry Tibetans that all humans, Chinese and Tibetan, are flesh and blood, he shot himself. Shu Wen returned to China to ensure that her husband would be awarded the status of revolutionary martyr. “Sky Burial” is a passionate story, simply told.

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The Icarus Girl

A Novel

Helen Oyeyemi

Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday: 352 pp., $23.95

Nigeria loomed “out from across all the water and land that they had to cross in the aeroplane, reaching out ... with spindly arms made of dry, crackling grass like straw, wanting to pull her down against its beating heart, to the centre of the heat, so she would pop and crackle like marshmallow.”

Jessy is a girl in three worlds: England, Nigeria and the spirit world. Given to panic attacks at age 8, she is taken by her parents to Nigeria to visit her grandparents. There she meets her imaginary friend TillyTilly, and on her return to London she is even less fit for the real world. Her mother had left Nigeria to study medicine, studied English instead, became a writer and married a white man. She “gave up all her talk of healing people, and married some omugo oyinbo man who knows nothing,” Jessy’s grandfather explains. In England, TillyTilly teaches Jessy how to speak Yoruba and summons up the ghost of Jessy’s twin sister, Fern, who died at birth. A haunted child makes a terrifying story, and Oyeyemi puts us, whether we like it or not, squarely in Jessy’s body, seeing the split-level world as she sees it, trapped, now and then, in between.

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Moura

The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg

Nina Berberova, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester

New York Review Books: 360 pp., $24.95

Baroness? Muse? Spy? Who can resist this self-made legend? Even her biographer, Nina Berberova, gingerly skirts the myth. Moura, called the “Iron Woman” by Maxim Gorki, her lover of many years, was born in 1892. Hers was a generation, writes Berberova, of Russians destroyed by World War I and the Russian Revolution. In 1911, she married Baron Ivan Benckendorff and had two children. In 1917, as the revolution broke out, Benckendorff was clubbed to death by peasants on his estate in Estonia. Moura had meanwhile fled to Petrograd, leaving her children behind. She had connections at the British Embassy, where she met her next husband, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was accused of spying and sent back to England. Eventually moving there, Moura lived by her wits and charm. She had an affair with H.G. Wells and outlived all the “great men.” When she died, in 1974, the Times of London remembered her as “hostess and intellectual leader.”