Also, among my current reading projects, I’ve been reading a book in Russian, the title of which I would translate as ‘The Dancer from Khiva, or Story of a Simple Soul.’ Although I’m not terribly far into it, I know I will finish it before too much longer. The vocabulary is a good level for me, possibly because the author, Bibish, is not a native speaker either. Instead, she is a Uzbek woman, born in the mid-sixties in a small rural village, surrounded by a traditional society which, despite Soviet theories of lifting the veil from the woman of the East (after all, женщина — тоже человек), didn’t particularly treat women the way sensitive Westerners are used to thinking they should be treated.

Yeah, raped twice in the first forty pages. Still, she keeps going, and she’s doing her best not to sit still and wait for the blows to fall.

I bought the book at the semi-annual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, because it had a nice looking cover, and wasn’t obviously a translation of a trashy English detective or romance novel.

A little googling leads me to the discovery that the book was on the best seller lists in Russia when it came out in 2004, shortly after my study abroad time. There’s a sequel called Talk Show for a Simple Soul. More than that, despite speculation, it does seem to be a true story. I found an interview, and, strangely enough, Bibish’s livejournal.

I’m trying to discover if the book has been translated to English, because I feel it ought to be.