[LINK] "In Thimphu"

[rfmcdonald]

At the London Review of Books blog, Gavin Francis looks at a bookstore in Thimphu, the capital of the still somewhat isolationist Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Despite everything, books--and the world they represent--still come in.

At the Junction bookshop in Thimphu the manager is reading Sartre’s Age of Reason. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Nausea for months,’ she says, ‘but the Indian distributors won’t send it up.’ On a stand in the centre of the shop there are glossy photo books: cute, scruffy waifs; austere Himalayan panoramas; a coffee-table celebration of carved wooden phalluses (the Bhutanese strain of Buddhism employs phallic symbolism with zeal). These are the books laid out for souvenir shoppers. On the shelves, there’s a section dedicated to Ancient Greek drama, another to 19th-century Russian novelists (all in English translation). There’s a volume of Elizabeth Bishop, and some Freud. She has sold her last copy of Infinite Jest but still has a copy of The Pale King.

I take a copy of Barthes’s Mythologies over to the counter. On the floor is a stray dog, one of the custard-coloured mongrels that roll in Thimphu’s dirt by day and howl to one another at night. The manager strokes the dog’s patchy fur. ‘His name is Motay,’ her companion tells me. ‘It means “the fat one”. People here feed him because he barks only at the police.’

On the main square outside there are monks and nuns wearing burgundy robes; some have prayer wheels, others have cell phones. Most of the local men are wearing the gho, a robe with a knee-length skirt a little like a kilt, and the women the ankle-length kira. Bhutan wants its traditional dress to be more than a gimmick for the tourists: at many of the city’s institutions there are signs insisting ‘Formal Dress Only’.

I sit down with the Barthes and open to ‘The Lost Continent’, an essay that scolds the West for stereotyping and exoticising the East. ‘This same Orient which has today become the centre of the world,’ Barthes writes, ‘we see… all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.’