Chingiz Aitmatov, My Poplar in a Red Scarf

This is a book I’ve finished reading now for the second time, because I remembered how good it was. There are many spoilers here, so you can stop reading now if you’d like. I’ve swallowed the book whole today and read 107 pages of it (it’s a small book). It’s a story about Ilias, a truck driver from Tian Shen in Kyrgyzstan that tells his story to a young journalist. It’s a story about tragedy and beauty, love and heartache. Ilias meets for the first time with Asel, a young woman, in her aiyl (a kyrgyzic village).

She is soft mannered, naive, and Ilias calls her his soft poplar. They have hurdles, she’s supposed to get married to a distant family member but Ilias and Asel run off to where he works, the transport hub. They get married and have a child, Samat. Ilias chooses the name. But things get dark. Because of his pride, that leads to a mistake Ilias makes in his work (he almost made it but it was winter and he didn’t fully succeed), a snowball runs down in Ilias’ life.

He cheats on his wife with Kediche, the forewoman at the transport hub one time. When he returns, Asel is worried about what happened to him, and he almost tells her that he cheated, but he does not, and he keeps on cheating on her until Asel finds out the truth. She leaves with his son, he lives with Kediche. But he doesn’t love her (though she does), and they break up. Ilias gets drunk like he does a lot to drown his pain, and has an accident with his truck.

Guess who finds him and helps him out? Asel’s new husband, Baytemir. Ilias helped him on the road one time. Now Samat thinks Baytemir is his dad (he adopted him when he was a baby and got married to Asel down the road), and there is a reencounter between Ilias, Asel and Samat. Asel searched for him so much, until Jentay, a devious truck driver, says something to her (we don’t know what, probably that Ilias moved in with Kediche) and she gets very sad, disappointed and hurt.

Returning to the now in the story, Samat loves the whole concept of driving, and one day he and his friends, who live close to where now Ilias works (which is the old transport hub) talk to him, and the habit of driving them around in his truck gets formed. But Asel finds out, blocks from Samat the option of driving with Ilias, and one time Ilias encounters Samat and drives him around (he made him a present too), but that goes wrong, and Samat wants his adoptive father, Baytemir, and insists of getting off the truck. Ilias drops him off.

The story ends with Ilias telling the young journalist he met on the train that he will have a new family, new life. Bitter. Very bitter. The story is filled with picturesqueness, beautiful insights on life and very raw humanness. I felt like the sorrow and regret were my own, I felt them on my flesh. The beginning is so lighthearted and fun, and the ending is so heavy with regret, heartache, pain. It is filled with life’s unexpected turns, too many mistakes that were being done, so many opportunities that were missed.

But it is a story interwoven and inter laden with beauty in the form of simple but rich authenticity expressed through language, fondness, tragedies. It is a story from the 20th century that we can all learn from, and understand that people are the same in their essence, whether now or 65 (or more) years ago. By the way, the book’s been published in 1961. That’s why I said 65 years.

This is a book read with bated breath. And we can all learn from it.