

Not a crowded area ... a tourist walks along the shore of Ala-Kul lake in Kyrgyzstan. Photograph: Antoine Lambroschini/AFP

Back in 1999, as I prepared to move to Kazakhstan, I went looking for some books about the country. I didn't find many. In fact, apart from a few paragraphs in Fitzroy MacLean's Eastern Approaches there was nothing. Even after I arrived and visited a kind of official shop for foreigners, I couldn't find anything in English other than an edition of the works of the national poet Abai Kunanbaev (1845-1904). Though much had been lost in translation there were one or two memorable lines containing profound truth, such as the following:

Man is a sack, full of shit. When you die, you'll smell worse than shit.

I didn't make that up, by the way. It's in the Book of Words, p 59 (El Bureau, Almaty, 1995).

Eight years later I have at last found another book by a Kazakh in English: The Silent Steppe, the Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov. Shayakhmetov was born in 1922 and lived through collectivisation, famine and Stalingrad. And that of course explains why the book has been published in Britain and America. It took about five decades, but now even very progressive people will admit that Stalin was a Bad Thing, and gulag stories have become extremely popular. Who knows, they may yet displace Nazi atrocities from their long-held position as apocalypse porn of choice for a flaccid western intellectual class, the same way coffee overtook tea as the national drink in the late 90s.

Shayakhmetov's account of his Fate (the original title) is worth a hundred footnotes to the history of Stalin's crimes written by modish historians and novelists. Not only are the stories deeply affecting and startling - he writes without a trace of bitterness - but the setting is radically alien to western eyes. The book contains much ethnographic detail about nomadic customs and traditions, and the chapters where he describes how, as a nine-year-old boy, he roamed alone in search of food and lodgings read like a survival guide to living in the steppe. The clan system, which nowadays is largely a source of corruption and strife in central Asian politics, suddenly makes a lot of sense as the only guarantee of survival in such conditions, and the destruction of its traditional form reads like a tragedy.

Shayakhmetov also illuminates a central Asian version of Islam and draws multiple portraits of family members and friends, both Russian and Kazakh, retrieving them from oblivion. Now a retired headmaster living in west Kazakhstan, he explains that he wrote his book for the modern generation of Kazakhs, to show them how their grandparents lived. But it has a lot to teach foreigners too; his dignified endurance of suffering is humbling.

The publishers are to be commended for bringing this book into print. After finishing it, however, I started thinking about other central Asian authors that have been translated into English - and they number a precious few. Certainly there are many crappy books written by foreign policy "experts" that view the countries exclusively through the prism of western interests, not to mention multiple retracings of the Silk Road by travel authors, because there can never be enough of an ancient trope that's been ground into the dust a thousand times, obviously. And let's not forget the histories of "the Great Game" where the natives are occasionally granted a role as extras in the background.

But books written by the indigenous population, giving their perspective on things? Fat chance. I can think of the following: · A few out of print books by the soviet Kyrgyz author Chingis Aitmatov. · Half of the novel Hurammabad written by Andrey Volos, an ethnic Russian from Tadjikistan, published in the journal Glas a few years ago. · The Railway by Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov. · A long out-of-print edition of Turkmenistan's national poet Makhtumkuli versified by Brian Aldiss.

And that's about it, though there are probably a few others. I'm also tempted to include Andrei Platonov's novel Dzhan (horribly retitled Soul in the otherwise excellent translation by Robert Chandler) which, though the author was Russian, is considered by central Asian writers to be one of the best books ever written about their region.

It would be nice if more publishers took a chance on authors from Kazakhstan and elsewhere. A translation of the Kyrgyz national epic Manas would not go amiss. Berdy Kerbabaev's Sholokhov-esque reconstruction of the founding of Soviet Turkmenistan, The Decisive Step, is still revered by Turkmen dissidents even if it is a work of desert socialist realism. Or, heaven forbid, a contemporary author writing about life now. Somehow though I think it might be more than another eight years before that comes to pass. Most readers aren't interested anyway, unless it's got Stalin in it, so central Asian literature is likely to remain in the shadows. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.