"Chanca", "Texcacal", and "Chon Bum" are three cities in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula that enjoyed great religious importance during the class war waged by the Mayas against the Spanish colonizers. The religious importance of these cities is due to their being centers of the phenomenon of speaking crosses.
In this wonderful book, the French writer (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008) tells, with great poetry, about his observations in these towns, in a captivating style. The trees, the water, the wind, the forests, the sky, and the earth, all of them become humanized in Le Clezio’s writing, as He has a unique ability to transform nature and its elements into vibrant, sensual things.
Zainab and Ahmed are two children who were separated from sharing school seats by Zainab’s move with her family to Ankara, and her boyfriend staying in Istanbul. The letters became their way of maintaining their friendship by exchanging funny stories, daily adventures, and discussing the oddities of the adult world: adults’ confusion in front of their managers, and parents’ desperation to showcase their children’s talents. “The wonderful ones” in front of the guests, and the parents’ insistence that they were all outstanding, obedient, honest, and of course the top of their class.
In this novel written for children, parents, and teachers alike, Aziz Nesin reconstructs events from the perspective through which children see the world, judging the behavior of adults and the double standards they live under. Like his always controversial books, the book - this time - provokes adults by revealing their image in the eyes of their children, thus asking: What happens to children when they grow up?
