Quotes of the Day

Kuraj, as Silvia di Natale notes in her remarkable first novel of that name, is a Kyrgyz word for a kind of bush that is blown across the Central Asian steppes by winter winds, shedding seeds, leaves and branches as it goes. The English-language equivalent is tumbleweed, which certainly describes the book's tragically displaced heroine, Kaja, and in a sense the work itself.

The talk of the 2000 Frankfurt Book Fair, Kuraj won a yurtful of literary prizes after it first appeared in Italy in the same year. Subsequent translations have charmed critics in France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain. Newly published in English, it comes with a map of the many trans-Caucasian journeys recounted, plus a glossary of words imported from Arabic, Hindi, Kyrgyz and Russian: you're in for a long — and enchanting — trip. Kaja, born into the nomadic Tunshan tribe in the late 1930s, can trace her ancestry back to Genghis Khan. She grows up in the warm embrace of family and clan, close to nature though not entirely removed from civilization. "We were tolerant, or perhaps merely eclectic," she says. "You cannot live at the crossroads of the caravans without absorbing the way of thinking of all those who have been there before you."

That tolerance is gravely strained by Stalin, who is trying to force the Tunshan and other Central Asian tribes into collective farms — and, as World War II erupts, into the Red Army. Kaja's charismatic father Ul'an decides to fight for his people's freedom by joining the invading German forces. He befriends a scholarly Wehrmacht officer, Günther Berger. Amid the inferno of Stalingrad and the coarser hell of a Soviet prison camp, Ul'an exacts a pledge from Berger that will alter Kaja's life completely.

This consigns her, at age 9, to a new life amid the ruins of postwar Cologne and a tribe of incomprehensible strangers. "I felt like a creature cut off from everything," she says, "a marmot dropped by a white hawk in the middle of the desert." Her struggle over the next years to put down roots is told with painful simplicity. Torn from the comforts of the yurt, Kaja endures "the feeling of suffocation and the fear that the roof is falling in on my head. Why did these people live in houses with no holes in the roof?" Inexorably, she acquires a new language, religion and way of life, shedding leaves and branches as she goes — though never the sense that she belongs someplace else. Eventually, she can recall only one word of Kyrgyz, her native tongue: kuraj.

Di Natale is herself something of a kuraj. Born 54 years ago in Genoa, she studied in Milan and Monaco, became an ethnosociologist (known for her monograph on Andalusian farm workers) and settled in Germany, where she lives with her husband and son. For Kuraj, Di Natale interviewed scholars of Central Asia, Stalingrad veterans, former prison-camp inmates, Cologne civilians who survived the war and a Tunshan woman she calls Kaja. Accordingly, Kuraj sometimes reads like an ethnosociological monograph, with exacting descriptions of Tunshan customs and ceremonies, as well as Lord of the Rings dialogue ("May Qormusda grant you long life, khan of the Tunshan").

Such false notes are rare. Di Natale's account of the fighting at Stalingrad is thrilling, her descriptions of postwar German privations heartbreaking, her imagery cunning (Berger, for instance, hitches a ride to the killing fields of Stalingrad on a truckload of sheep), and her insights into the weirdness of Western ways perceptive. Back home, "I would already have had a husband," Kaja laments as a surly Cologne teenager. "Here, on the other hand, I lived a kind of extended childhood, in which everything seemed to be an apprenticeship and nothing is done entirely seriously."

Di Natale's apprenticeship as a writer is entirely serious. Her second novel, Il Giardino del Luppolo (The Hop Garden), published last year in Italy, is about a young German in the 1920s who has hallucinatory premonitions of Hitler's rise. This month comes her latest, L'Ombre del Cerro (Shadow of the Turkey Oak), about two friends struggling to survive the wartime chaos of a country Di Natale once knew: Italy. For her — as for Kaja and millions of others in this rootless, globalized age — the search for home never ends.

• DONALD MORRISON
• Silvia Di Natale tells the moving tale of a Kyrgyz nomad looking for roots