ကျွန်မ၏သစ်ပင်

by ဂျူး

519 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Ju is a Burmese novelist, well known for her strong, intelligent female characters.

Despite her interest in writing, upon her mother's prodding, she pursued medical studies at the Institute of Medicine, Mandalay. She started writing while in medical school, and her first short story (ရာဇဝင်ထဲမှာမောင့်ကိုထားရစ်ခဲ့) was published in 1979. Her writing career took off in the late 1980s, with her debut novel, Remembrance (အမှတ်တရ), published in 1987.The bestseller novel stirred controversy for endorsing Western existentialist philosophy and portraying cohabiting unwed couples.

She has published fifteen novels (most of them were adapted into films), seven collections of short stories and seven collections of articles on the environment. She currently works as a co-founder of an HIV positive children orphanage and also a participant in the HIV/AIDS Media Initiative and Yadana Metta Foundation. Her writings now focus on environmental conservation.

Reviews

[Yamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible writing. One of her best works.
The switches from imagination to reality, dream to reality and overlapping desires are seamless and impeccable.
It could obviously showcase the character's psyche.
It would have be 5 stars unless for obvious (and textbook) misogy(sss)!! Such sexist lines granted it was written in the 90s. Makes me wonder if the writer would be still proud of that when she rereads those in the current time or in the future.

[Wai Yan Tun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now, I have mixed feelings when it comes to this book. When I assert that, it doesn’t indicate that I hate this book. Oh, no. On the contrary. ဆရာမဂ်ူး does her very best elevates this book to it’s maximum limits within it’s narrative frame. However I do butt heads with the genre of this book. Maybe I have consumed media within this narrative frame one too many times. I have gotten numb to the whole “under appreciated artist finds success” narrative.

The book is by it’s core, a musical, romance, coming of age story centring around our titular, stubborn yet strong willed and hardworking main character Oak Soe. ဆရာမဂ်ူး does a fantastic job weaving the story to make the reader want to root for a romance that one would find difficult to accept under normal circumstances. Even the most diamond of hearts may be swayed by the magic of her words. Daw Ni Ni Zaw shines a great deal in this book. It is safe to say I’ve never seen a more caring, self-sacrificial, dutiful woman in my reading career. (Still in it’s baby steps)

As the book is set and published in 1997, I can overlook the blatantly sexist, old-fashioned schools of thought when it comes to women. However the character relationships and the narrative direction can be predictable and dull. The pacing in the middle drags on and on for hours on end, for what I personally believe is dissatisfying payoff. Lastly, for the love of god, I cannot seem to like or want to root for our hero Oak Soe because of his erratic, unpredictable and unreliable personality He cannot seem to stick to his viewpoint or ideals and shift chaotically throughout the book. To me, he just seems like a ungrateful brat, ignorant of what his father, his lover, his friends and his manager does for his sake.

[Sébastien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the protagonist being an adolescent male, the title was named ‘My Tree’ with feminine pronoun. After an argument with his father, Oak Soe, an aspiring singer and song writer, left his hometown and started working random jobs in Yangon. Later he worked as a driver for an older woman, Daw Ni Ni Zaw, and she discovered his musical talent. From that, his music career escalated and became a successful artist. His strained relationship with his father and the unsettling relationship with Daw Ni Ni Zaw were meticulously written and it was such a satisfying read.

Apart from her relentless use of her weak translations of lyrics from some 90’s english songs in between, regardless of the storyline they didn’t fit in, it was actually a beautiful read. The relationship between the protagonist and the older female was poignantly crafted with such subtlety. I believe she had to tone down her writing cause at that time, the Board of Literary Censorship was quite extreme and conservative so when it comes to portraying the relationship between two unmarried couple, she had to be subtle.

Personally, I feel this book has one of the most pervasive female characters I have read in Burmese books. Like a kind mother, she cared for him; like a good employer, she cultivated his music career; like a considerate lover, she put up with his passive-aggressive behaviours. She is so giving.

I normally prefer reading her short stories to her novels but this book is my absolute favourite of hers. Yesterday afternoon, I took a detour from my current read and picked up this book by Juu for the umpteenth time. (Simply because I feel like it.) Re-reading this book brought me a mix of joy and sadness as it has always been. 4 stars out of 5.

[သက်ဆု]

ဆရာမရဲ့ အရေးအသားများကို အရမ်းကြိုက်မိပါတယ်

[Lynn Niño · Rating 5 out of 5]

ဟိုးငယ္ဘ၀ အထက္တန္း ေက်ာင္းသားဘ၀ . . နယ္မွာေနတုန္းက ငွား ဖတ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။
ဇာတ္လမ္းထဲက rock သီခ်င္းေတြနဲ႔အတူ ကိုယ္တိုင္ ဖီးလ္ ေတြ တက္ခဲ့ေပါ့။
အသက္ႀကီး လာလို႔ ေနာက္တစ္ေခါက္ ထပ္ဖတ္ေတာ့လည္း ႀကိဳက္တုန္းပါပဲ။
အရင္တုန္းက ရွာရခက္ခဲ့တဲ့ သီခ်င္း ေတြ ထဲက ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကို နားေထာင္ၾကည့္ၿပီးတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွ ျပန္ဖတ္ၾကည့္ေတာ့ ပိုၿပီး ဖီးလ္လာခဲ့တယ္ေပါ့။