Woman

At the moment I'm reading Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. As it says, it is a novel written in nine parts. I've counted the chapters and it's come out as ten, but never mind. It is quite an interesting book, actually it's more like a collection of short stories, but there are some references to each other, especially in two consecutive chapters. The title of each chapter is a place, e.g. Tokyo, London, etc. And each one of the stories is told in first person singular, but this is a different I in each chapter. So it's like a virtual journey through minds, and the fifth (middle) story, "Mongolia," is exactly about such a journey. It is told by a kind of ghost, a noncorpus, who is "transmigrating" from person to person, in order to find out who he/she is.
Normally I don't write about books before finishing them as a whole, but one of the stories was so moving for me, that I felt I must write about it. It is called "Holy Mountain," and it is the fourth story. It is about a woman who spends all her life in a tea shack, in a village somewhere in China, if I'm not mistaken. As we are reading her story we learn about how all the different regimes, from Kuomintang to Japanese and Maoists, etc. literally marched through her mountain and her life, none of them doing any good. This woman spends her life making tea and noodles to whoever comes into her shack, trying to make a living. Come what may, she finds solace talking to her magic tree and the sculpture of Lord Buddha, and her only desire is to see her daughter before she dies.
The wisdom of this illiterate peasant woman and the way she sees what we know only from history books if at all, was amazing, naive and cruel at the same time, and also touching. You know I have this idea of common experience of womanhood, and this is yet another example, and it struck me the more so as it was written by a man, actually a white anglo-saxon guy. This is the kind of story I know only from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (which unfortunately I have only seen as a film as yet), and here it is, written by this guy. I don't know how come he knows all this, and I'm not referring to historical facts only. The story of this woman and the way it is told is hundred percent credible for me, except for its being written in English.
Maybe it's just because of our Western prejudice and all the staff we learnt about post-colonial female literature, but I feel that if it were the only story in the book, it still would be the greatest achievement of his oeuvre. I mean, he doesn't have to write anything after that, and I wonder if he can do better.

PS. I love it when a book has such a beautiful cover.