Yangzom Brauen is a young Swiss actress and political activist, born in Zurich to a Swiss father and a Tibetan mother. She grew up with undeniably Western sensibilities but a profound connection to her mother's troubled home, and her rich, complex history would make for a great memoir on its own. But Across Many Mountains is not just a personal memoir--it's a story of an extraordinary family, spanning three generations and nearly a hundred years of Tibetan history.
With deftness and compassion, Brauen tells the astonishing story of Kunsang and Sonam, her grandmother and mother, who fled across the treacherous Himalayas when Sonam was a child to escape the horrors of the Chinese invasion. Once in India, the tightly bonded pair was free from Chinese oppression but faced with poverty and terrible homesickness. Then Sonam fell in love with a young Swiss scholar, and the unlikely trio made a less harrowing escape across another mountain range--the Alps--to again begin a new life. Adjustment to life in Switzerland came with difficulties of its own, and Tibet's plight remains painful and uncertain.
Brauen's prose is unadorned but emotionally rich. Her rendering of Kunsang's early life as a Buddhist nun in a remote monastery is particularly brilliant: "The nun in charge of the morning call sent her long, lamenting melody out over the white-frosted fields.... One after another, the other nuns joined in, until a blanket of sound lay over the mountain pastures, woven from hollow yet powerful tones." That, in essence, is this book--a chorus of female voices, the shadows of a mountain range, and a long, lamenting melody. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice