This is the first time I read a proper book in Mongolian. What can I say? It's about a time of great chaos, when Mongolia wasn't much of a sovereign country. Plagued by Chinese pseudo-occupation, then becoming a kind of playground of Russian influence, I was most of all saddened to see just how weak as a nation we were. Though one must keep in mind that this novel mixes fiction with fact, and that it was written during socialist times and therefore misses any trace of criticism of the socialist movement led by Sukhbaatar.
But personally, I read this book to get used to reading proper Mongolian literature and improve my reading comprehension. Though it is my mother tongue, I'm not half as fluent as I'd like to be. This book was good for improving my skills, learning about the history and also, to learn about how regular people lived in those days.
The writer has a very direct way of writing, though sometimes he expresses himself very elegantly, which were the passages that were the hardest to understand. Almost half of the vocabulary were words that modern Mongolians don't use anymore, partly because they were specific to the herding way of life, and partly because modern Mongolians have an abysmally small vocabulary. It's a real problem.
Anyway, all in all I'll say this novel is educational, well written and it has been a big help in my improvement. I don't feel all that comfortable actually judging the quality of it though. I feel I'm not good enough in my Mongolian to start passing out grades to the literary greats here.