KURAJ

Why do those strange Germans “live in houses with no holes in the roof? Why did they shut themselves of their own free will between brick walls?” So wonders the narrator of this ambitious but ponderous coming-of-age tale.

Naja is a proud descendant of Genghis Khan, a nomad for whom her ancestral Land of the Seven Rivers, in the heart of Asia, is barely a memory. Now, like a kuraj—a tumbleweed—she finds herself blown by history’s gales across a continent and into an alien land, the postwar Germany of those lean years before the economic miracle of the 1950s. Debut novelist di Natale, an Italian-born ethnologist and longtime resident of Germany, works a scenario worthy of Pasternak: Naja has ended up in Germany because her warrior father, U’lan, had made the fateful choice of opposing the Soviet regime, the new conquerors of the steppes, and of allying with the invading Nazi armies. For their part, Hitler’s minions aren’t sure what to make of these knife-wielding nomads, who now click their “boots with the curled toes, decorated with colored embroidery” and share the Nazi salute with their new comrades-in-arms; the best moments of di Natale’s narrative are depictions of cultural collision and mutual bewilderment that accompany U’lan’s slow-building friendship with the German officer who fights alongside him and, in the end, rescues Naja from the vengeful Soviets. The German is of a philosophical, ruminative bent, and he provides a well-drawn counterpoint to the more action-inclined U’lan, freedom personified, who is given to wondering why the Germans don’t shed their leader: “When a khan is worthless, his men choose another. But why do you keep this khan who does not know how to win?”

The back-and-forth between Western modern and Eastern sage sharpens a narrative full of good moments. Still, glacially paced and marked by long passages in which not much happens, it’s not for the impatient.