A book a day: Chinguiz Aitmatov: Yamilia

Original title: Jamyla
Translation: Marta Sánchez-Nieves Fernández
Year of publication: 1958
Valuation: Advisable

We return to the fray with the Kyrgyz writer Chinguiz Aitmatov. The reading of More than a century the day lengthens (and the kindness of Automática, it must be said) lead us to this Yamiliaa short novel (or long story?) of just 90 pages that hides, in its apparent simplicity, tender and emotional stories.

Kyrgyz steppe, year 1942. The men have been called up and the teenager Seit remains on the kolkhoz with his family, which includes Yamilia, his older brother’s wife. The arrival of Daniyar, a soldier wounded in the conflict, and the subsequent love that is born between him and Yamilia will be one of the fundamental axes of the novel.

But this is oversimplifying. Because Yamilia It has several layers that make the text go far beyond a “simple” love story. Thus, we find:

• a chronicle of the social and cultural life of the people of the steppe,
• an impressionist novel in which the landscapes and their contrasts seem to hide something inaccessible,
• a novel about the eternal struggle between duty and happiness, between individual freedom and the conventions of the environment and, above all,
• a coming-of-age novel. Almost all the references I have found of Yamilia They refer to the love story between Yamilia and Daniyar and ignore what this means for Seit himself and the change that takes place in him and in his way of seeing the world. Come on, saving the geographical and thematic distances, I think I see here something of The path by Delibes.

There are two aspects that stand out in Aitmatov’s novel: the conjugation of the “exterior” landscape / interior landscape of the protagonists and their mixture of natural beauty and anguish and the evolution of the character of Seit, a narrator who goes back in time and witness of a story that cannot be fully grasped.

Why is life so incomprehensible and complicated?

On the less positive side, perhaps a certain predictability in terms of the “love” plot (incompatible characters, initial rejection, etc.) and greater development in Daniyar’s (pre)story, in what led him to that reserved, brooding character. and taciturn. But this would be another novel, more “ambitious” or more “historical.”

In any case, this is a beautiful novel by Aitmatov, an author of tremendous success at the time who well deserves the recovery of his work.

Also by Chinguiz Aitmatov at ULAD: More than a century the day lengthens