The Garden of Evening Mists (Audible Audio Edition) Tan Twan Eng Anna Bentinck Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Download As PDF : The Garden of Evening Mists (Audible Audio Edition) Tan Twan Eng Anna Bentinck Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Short listed for the Man Booker Prize 2012.
Malaya, 1949. After a career spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh - herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp - seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya. There she meets the enigmatic Aritomo, an exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Yun Ling asks Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister. But the jungle holds secrets of its own...
The Garden of Evening Mists (Audible Audio Edition) Tan Twan Eng Anna Bentinck Whole Story Audiobooks Books
This story begins on the last day of Teoh Yun Ling's career as a Supreme Court justice in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in the mid 1980s. Yun Ling has had, by every measure, a remarkable and successful life despite extreme hardship and loss. She was born to privilege, as a member of a wealthy Straits Chinese family, but at the age of 17 she and her older sister Yun Hong were captured by Japanese soldiers and taken to a prison camp hidden within the jungle of the Malayan Peninsula. The prisoners were brutally tortured there, and only one survived at the end of the war: Yun Ling.After she completes her law studies in England, she returns to Malaysia to practice, serving as a prosecutor for the Malayan government in the trials of captured Japanese Army soldiers. Her sister's death continues to haunt her, and she decides to honor her sister's memory by building a Japanese garden, as Yun Hong loved them dearly. In 1951 she returns to the home of a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, a South African tea planter in Cameron Highlands in the Malayan state of Pahang, whose friend Nakamura Aritomo is a highly regarded gardener--and the former chief gardener to Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Yun Ling struggles to overcome her deep hatred of the Japanese, and works under Aritomo as an apprentice, helping him to rebuild his own garden while learning the craft from him.
However, the tranquil mountainous setting also hosts the Malayan National Liberation Army, a group of communist guerrilla soldiers who are at war with the colonial government during the Malayan Emergency. Colonists such as Pretorius are frequent targets of the guerrillas, subject to robbery, assault and murder, but Yun Ling is also at great risk, as she also prosecuted captured guerrillas after the war trials had concluded, and the communists in the area are aware of her presence there.
As Yun Ling becomes closer to Aritomo, she learns more about the hidden roles he assumed during the Japanese occupation, as she seeks to discover what happened to the other prisoners in the camp, and to achieve closure and inner peace with herself, her family and with him.
The novel is filled with numerous additional characters, story lines and themes, which delicately intersect and overlap each other. Certain seemingly insignificant events in the early and middle sections of the book become clearer as the book progresses, as Eng masterfully creates a story that requires close attention from the reader, similar to that which is necessary to understand and appreciate the finer aspects of a Japanese garden.
"The Garden of Evening Mists" is an almost indescribably beautiful, rich and rewarding novel with multiple layers that are expertly weaved into a coherent work of art. Tan Twan Eng deserves to be commended for this astonishing work, which would be a worthy winner of this year's Booker Prize.
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The Garden of Evening Mists (Audible Audio Edition) Tan Twan Eng Anna Bentinck Whole Story Audiobooks Books Reviews
Review by Elise Hadden, Under the Heather Books [...]
Summary
As you settle into the first page of The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng and his majestic prose will gently transport you into a painfully beautiful past. It’s Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambridge and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan.
As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to Aritomo and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day. But the Garden of Evening Mists is also a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? Why is it that Yun Ling’s friend and host, Magnus Praetorius, seems almost immune from the depredations of the Communists? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?
—Goodreads description, edited and abbreviated
P.S. Don’t forget to check out more beautiful quotes from this book in this Thursday Quotables!
“Below these words was the garden’s name in English EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”
What I Liked
The prose in this novel is perhaps the most beautiful I have ever encountered. Tan Twan Eng gives us writing that is poetic, lyrical, and laced with a rare subtle strength. The depictions of the scenery are brilliantly evocative, and I felt an intimate understanding of the landscape. His characterization was spectacular, mysterious and commanding.
Now, to dive beyond the style of writing and into the subject matter. All I can say is a gigantic, resounding, earthshattering WOW. This book tackled a dizzying array of emotional and political aspects of the Pacific War. As Yun Ling struggles with forgiveness, grief, and memory, the complexities of this devastating war are carefully resurrected. Aritomo, the master gardener, is ripe with beautiful bits of wisdom and yet remains an enigma. Tan Twan Eng weaves through an exploration of the power of memory and forgetting, as well as the elaborate world of Japanese art and horimono, with such penetrating insight that the reader cannot help but be irrevocably changed.
“That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.”
What I Didn’t Like
I have a headache from the strain of trying to find something to criticize in this book. I listened to it as an audiobook, narrated by Anna Bentinck. Although I ended up enjoying her narration very much, I do wish I had a hard copy. Her attempts at mimicking male Japanese voices and female Chinese ones were…painful. So, my only complaint is that the narrator doesn’t have the voice range of Mel Blanc. I’d say that’s a good sign.
“Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”
My Recommendation
This book is not for the faint of heart. It tackles terrifying and sometimes gruesome scenes. However, Tan Twan Eng frosts even the most offensive of the events in a veil of pensive reflection. He transforms this vicarious trauma into something hurts in all the right places, illuminating the unfathomable and confronting the unjust. While reading, I felt I was in a floating world, caressed by dew and mountain breezes even as I gazed with perfect clarity on the tortured world below. It’s a breathtaking and powerful depiction of the depths of love, pain, and the capacity to forgive.
However, if you like fast-paced novels with a lot of action, this certainly is not the book for you. Although many exciting things happen, the pace is slow, like swimming through water thick with reeds. It’s heavy on the physical descriptions, heavy on internal narration and emotions, and very light on urgency. I was l to the story while on a roadtrip and my poor fiance was bored out of his mind.
“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man.”
The barbarity of the Japanese military during World War II has received inadequate attention in western literature, where the Nazis get most all of the attention. Here Mr. Tan uses Japanese cruelty during the war as the touchstone of the story of the sole survivor of a labor camp in Malaya; all of other internees were murdered by the Japanese. The book tells that story in the context of the post-war creation of a formal Japanese garden in the Malay highlands after the war. The architect of the garden is the ex-pat former gardener of Hirohito, himself. The brutality of the Japanese military is juxtaposed to the cerebral art-form of the formal garden. The literary power of the book derives from the exploration of a Japanese culture marked by seven centuries of near unspeakable cruelty and militarism at home and abroad, but also deep devotion to beauty and perfection. There is a sense throughout that Mr. Tan believes that the Japanese cannot tolerate imperfection, and are inherently murderous as a result.
Regrettably, the book does not to explore this important concept in depth. Instead the uncomfortable considerations get crowded out and overwhelmed by a complicated plot narrative of post World War II Malay history. These plot elements include ex-Pat Boers, the English colonialists, the tea merchants, the communist revolutionaries, the ethnic Chinese, monasticism, unusual Japanese art forms, tattooing and the pursuit of Japanese war criminals.
In the end, I wasn’t sure what this book is really about. As I read it, I felt Mr. Tan was on the verge of grappling with some very big ideas. I wish he had taken a chance and committed fully to that path. This is a quite a good book; I think it might have been a great one.
This story begins on the last day of Teoh Yun Ling's career as a Supreme Court justice in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in the mid 1980s. Yun Ling has had, by every measure, a remarkable and successful life despite extreme hardship and loss. She was born to privilege, as a member of a wealthy Straits Chinese family, but at the age of 17 she and her older sister Yun Hong were captured by Japanese soldiers and taken to a prison camp hidden within the jungle of the Malayan Peninsula. The prisoners were brutally tortured there, and only one survived at the end of the war Yun Ling.
After she completes her law studies in England, she returns to Malaysia to practice, serving as a prosecutor for the Malayan government in the trials of captured Japanese Army soldiers. Her sister's death continues to haunt her, and she decides to honor her sister's memory by building a Japanese garden, as Yun Hong loved them dearly. In 1951 she returns to the home of a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, a South African tea planter in Cameron Highlands in the Malayan state of Pahang, whose friend Nakamura Aritomo is a highly regarded gardener--and the former chief gardener to Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Yun Ling struggles to overcome her deep hatred of the Japanese, and works under Aritomo as an apprentice, helping him to rebuild his own garden while learning the craft from him.
However, the tranquil mountainous setting also hosts the Malayan National Liberation Army, a group of communist guerrilla soldiers who are at war with the colonial government during the Malayan Emergency. Colonists such as Pretorius are frequent targets of the guerrillas, subject to robbery, assault and murder, but Yun Ling is also at great risk, as she also prosecuted captured guerrillas after the war trials had concluded, and the communists in the area are aware of her presence there.
As Yun Ling becomes closer to Aritomo, she learns more about the hidden roles he assumed during the Japanese occupation, as she seeks to discover what happened to the other prisoners in the camp, and to achieve closure and inner peace with herself, her family and with him.
The novel is filled with numerous additional characters, story lines and themes, which delicately intersect and overlap each other. Certain seemingly insignificant events in the early and middle sections of the book become clearer as the book progresses, as Eng masterfully creates a story that requires close attention from the reader, similar to that which is necessary to understand and appreciate the finer aspects of a Japanese garden.
"The Garden of Evening Mists" is an almost indescribably beautiful, rich and rewarding novel with multiple layers that are expertly weaved into a coherent work of art. Tan Twan Eng deserves to be commended for this astonishing work, which would be a worthy winner of this year's Booker Prize.
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