Burmese Lessons
Random House Canada
Finalist for the 2009 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction
Also published in the U.S.
When Karen Connelly first goes to Burma in 1996 to gather information for a series of articles about political prisoners, she discovers a place of unexpected beauty and generosity. She also encounters a country ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that imposes a code of censorship and terror. Carefully seeking out the regime’s critics, she witnesses mass demonstrations, attends protests, interviews detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and flees from the riot police herself. When it gets too risky to stay, Connelly flies back to Thailand, but she cannot leave Burma behind.
Her interest in the political turns more personal on the Thai-Burmese border, where she falls in love with Maung, the handsome and charismatic leader of one of the Burma’s many resistance groups. After spending time with Maung in various border towns and cities, and meeting his many colleagues and friends at his military camp in the jungle, she faces an agonizing decision: Maung wants to marry Connelly and have a family with her.
But if she marries him, she also weds his world and his lifelong cause. Struggling to weigh the idealism of her convictions against the harsh realities of life on the border, Connelly transports the reader into a world as dangerous as it is enchanting.
In prose layered with passion, regret, sensuality and wry humour, Burmese Lessons, a love story tells the captivating story of how one woman came to love a wounded, beautiful country as well as a gifted man who had dedicated his life to the struggle for political change.
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REVIEWS
“When Karen Connelly travelled to Burma in the mid-1990s, she planned merely to write a series of articles about an imprisoned dissident. Instead, she found herself writing a harrowing account of life under Burma's military dictatorship - the terror, the treachery, the brutality, but also the astonishingly resilient serenity, camaraderie and fatalism of the Burmese people. In the process, Connelly was forced to confront some of the most troubling questions any political writer must inevitably face: where is the line between being an observer and a participant, and what needs to be protected most: one's public writing or one's private life. An insightful, riveting book.”
— Jury citation, BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
“Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons: A Love Story combines the personal and lyrical dimensions of her journeys in Southeast Asia with the adventure of her encounters with danger. In doing so, the author has created a powerful internal testimony to an utterly perilous experience and personal dilemma, with individual as well as historical repercussions.”
— Governor General’s Award jury citation
“Treading the boundary between romance and politics, Connelly presents an evocative account of passionately living the revolution, shedding light on those who give everything to the cause, and those who love them. Piercing and raw.”
— Booklist
“Putting both her safety and heart on the line, Connelly renders deft passages on sexual longing and satiation that help anchor the book’s harsh sociopolitical themes…boldly examines Burma’s tumultuous climate and nuanced cultural ethos with colorful prose and gritty self-reflection.”
— Kirkus
“Burmese Lessons (which follows a superb novel by Ms. Connelly called The Lizard Cage, about Burma’s political prisoners) is a polished literary memoir that includes, along the way, an account (of) Burma’s turbulent history…Ms. Connelly is a hugely engaging writer.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“Deeply personal and raw…[Connelly] compels admiration for her brave intrusions into dangerous and awkward situations, and above all for her candour.”
— National Post
"In quietly beautiful, searching prose, Connelly shows us the small stories: the child labourer straining under loads of wet cement, a woman wailing over her son's corpse in a refugee camp, a mother hiding protesters in the room where her children are asleep… Burmese Lessons shows us more than a place, or a person in a place: it shows us a way to be in the world: open, seeing, breathing, awake."
— Literary Review of Canada