A ninety-year-old Evenki woman, wife of this northern China clan’s last chieftain, tells the story of a century of her reindeer-herding people’s life to “the rain and the fire” over the course of a single day, as the last of her people board trucks for a government settlement and she chooses to stay behind. It’s one day holding a hundred years, with the last-quarter moon bearing witness overhead. Immediately immersive, the graceful translation by Bruce Humes trusts you with the specificity — urireng, shirangju, the soul called umai — without burying you in glossary; you figure it out. The deaths, and there are many, land because they’re told flatly, the way I imagine a very old person might. Last Quarter is elegy, and a beautiful one.
The Last Quarter of the Moon