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Mongolia
Galsan Tschinag. Die graue Erde. Frankfurt a.M. Insel. 1999. 277 pages. DM 36. ISBN 3-458-16939-3.
"The Gray Earth," a novel of a young boy's coming of age, takes the form of reminiscences of the author's own childhood among the Tuvinian nomads, a Turkic-speaking minority, of the Mongolian People's Republic in the early 1950s. It is, in a sense, the continuation of a series of autobiographical novels inaugurated by Der blaire Hiniel in 1994 and Zwanzig and ein Tag in 1995 (see respectively UTT 69:1, p. 230, and 70:3, p. 764), and, like them, it describes the wa\ of life and explores the mentality of a traditional community confronted brusquely by "modernization" from the outside. Galsan Tschinag, who studied in Leipzig in the 1960s, writes in German.
Children are...