Mapped
Jamilia
Chingiz Aitmatov
Aitmatov's Talas valley in wartime: a Kyrgyz collective-farm village set between mountain ranges, the men gone to the front, the harvest to be carted down the steppe road and across the river to the railway. The map runs west from the regional town of Talas through the valley Aitmatov grew up in, out toward the line at Dzhambul over the Kazakh border.
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The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years
Chingiz Aitmatov
The Sarozek: a sun-scoured stretch of Kazakh steppe strung along the single-track railway that crosses Soviet Central Asia. A veteran signalman keeps a lonely junction here, and when an old friend dies he sets out with the burial party across the emptiness toward an ancient clan cemetery, only to find the ground swallowed by the fenced-off launch ranges of the space cosmodrome. Legend, railway and rocket share the same horizon.
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