This book was recommended to me as the best book available on understanding 20th-century Turkey. It focuses on the first two decades of the 20th century--when the Ottoman Empire was breaking apart and Turkey is formed. Interesting mix of history and fiction--background scenarios are historical while the main characters are from a fictitious small village. Both engaging and ponderous to read. Book is series of narratives told by the different characters--appropriate for an oral culture. One (Mustafa Kemal, first president of Turkey) is historical and the rest are the characters around this rural village. Character portrayal is engaging and endearing even though most often tragic. The larger political scenarios involving many different European and Asian countries get very complex and difficult to follow at times even for me who has a good understanding of world history. The middle third of the book portrays lives of soldiers at war (WW1 and aftermath)--perhaps the most horrific portrayal of war life that I've ever read. Truly sickening at times and I had to stop reading. Not an easy read, but most rewarding in terms of providing an background for understanding a country that is often neglected in contemporary news media.

One of my favorite reads of the year (2020). A cast of fascinating characters of different religious/cultural backgrounds who live together in a simple village in southwestern Turkey during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Their stories themselves are well told and the characters are both real and yet the sort you find in one of those "classic" novels of yesteryear. (Reviews often mention Dickens.) But all of this is threaded into the larger story of history, the wars and ethnic strife, the slow death of the "sick man of Europe," the Ottoman Empire. The conflicts right before and through World War I and in then on to the subsequent war for independence as Greece swept in with hopes of re-establishing their long past empire. Brutality is not in short supply, horrors of war, genocide, and ripping people from their lives to send them to war, deaths, or a new country where they no longer fit in. And throughout the novel the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic. The stories are at times funny, sometimes sad and heartbreaking, and always fascinating. To be fair, I lived in Turkey for a year so many of the cultural and language elements were familiar. The author doesn't always translate or even italicize Turkish terms but context makes them clear enough. Ironically, I found myself looking up a good number of his English words. The writing is excellent and I will seek out his other books. Despite being set in a no-tech backwater sort of village with superstitions and challenges most of us will never face, the novel connects to the larger human elements, themes of fate, death, love, hatred, making it feel so perfectly relevant even to current living and history -- as any great novel should. That says as much about the masterful writing as it does about the human race never really changing. Great great book.

Another one for the melancholy Turkish stories collection.

It's a long read! Feels like reading Proust with a different personality. Each chapter written very detail and descriptive. It talks about life, death, love, God and religion. How the greek can get along with the turks, how the moslem friends with the christian. Few heartbreaking chapters. All written in beautiful words.

Gimme more sweeping historical novels plz

With gentle humour and often acerbic irony, LdeB tells the story of the birth of Turkey mainly through the eyes of Muslim and Christian villagers who live peacefully together. The first half of the book describes village life, juxtaposing this with the ambitions of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). It is not until the outbreak of WWI that the villagers' lives are affected by the outside world. One of the village youths, Karatavuk, tells of his experiences at Gallipoli and no detail is spared. Tales of the horrors of WWI largely centre on French battlefields and allied losses at Gallipoli but the full horrors of trench warfare are graphically depicted here. The sights, sounds and smells of war and the horrific futility of a war founded on nationalist ambitions are described in minute detail. LdeB writes movingly about the physical and mental effect of war on boys and men, their wives, sisters and mothers. This is a masterly anti war novel.

I enjoyed the format of the novel, divided into short chapters portraying events through the eyes of many others, and following the events which led to continued fighting between Greeks, Turks and others for many years after WWI had ended. I had been unaware of this but it put into perspective an experience my partner and I had many years ago when we walked through no man's land in Nicosia, Cyprus. Leaving Greek Cyprus, we walked past an exhibition on Turk atrocities and entering Turkish Cyprus an exhibition on Greek atrocities. I hadn't understood the historical basis for the deep hatred between the two but do now.

Overall, this was a greatly satisfying, if at times harrowing, read.

Good grief, what a mess of a book. I really tried but I couldn't finish it. I was interested in it because I'd read about a dozen books on WWI and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I wasn't looking for a history book but a story. The author wrote pages and pages of the history of the time, some of it not completely accurate - such as suggesting the Kurds were responsible for the Armenian genocide. The rest of it was a history lecture I didn't need and that didn't move the story along. It also seemed he was in love with his own prose and his writing was driven more by his vanity than his story. I have a better than average vocabulary but was left stumped by obscure words that weren't defined by the online dictionary. And he used a huge number of words native to Turkish culture and country without defining them. He might have made them up for all I know! Overall a huge disappointment.

One of the GoodReads groups I am in, The World's Literature, is focusing on literature from and about Turkey this year. Birds Without Wings was one of the February picks (discussion will end up here,) and even though I started it a while ago, it took me staying up until 2 am this morning to get through it.

This is an incredibly well-executed novel. The author tells the story of Turkey in the early 20th century, from its development from the Ottoman Empire or Anatolia, into a time where the people living there embraced the word Turk, Turkish, Turkey (prior to that change, it had been a pretty derogatory term.) This is the second book I've read this year to include Mustafa Kemal, but while the other book focused on his violent acts from an outsider perspective, Birds Without Wings entwines his story from youth to Atatürk, and explains his pivotal role in where the country is now. It is done rather without judgment, just the facts. Well, I'm not sure. The Armenians are removed and the Christians are removed and the violence surrounding it is implied but not focused on.

The core of the story isn't Mustafa Kemal, however. It focuses on the people living in a small village where people speak Turkish written in a Greek alphabet, where friendships cross religious and ethnic lines, but war and governmental change creates conflict in all those areas. It is a sad but true transformation from tolerance to division. The story is told from multiple perspectives, from Iskander the Potter to the mistress of the wealthiest man in town. The writing is dense, filled with local color, and goes by quickly with the changing perspectives.

The author's opinion is clear throughout the novel, mourning the past where different people could live together in the days of the Ottoman Empire. This quotation sums up a great deal of the tone of the book:

"It was said in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshipers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side and in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which, although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which Istanbul would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come."

I can’t remember where I bought this book or even how long it has sat on my shelves, but what a lovely surprise it was. There was no synopsis or description on the cover so I truly went into knowing nothing.
It’s a beautiful story about the ending of the Ottoman Empire and the lives of those in a small village in the countryside navigating these monumental changes.
An amazing story about humanity, humor, and love.

Magnificent, vast, sprawling, resolutely humane, often funny, forgivably digressive. Highly recommended!

This book breaks your heart, but in a good way. DeBernieres' has a beautiful, eloquent, lyrical style, the effect of which is augmented by the tragic nature of much of his content. He also imbues his story with much pathos and humor. By doing so, he avoids heavy-handedness.

Birds Without Wings is a marvelously ambitious book. It is a epic about conflict and coexistence between Muslim and Christian Turks, Kurds and Armenians, set over the course of decades.

The book is historically informative, as it attempts to describe events without overly politicizing them. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys" in this book, but DeBernieres is not an apologist or moral relativist. Plainly, he feels that many of his characters are, to varying degrees, responsible for the tragedies he describes.

It is also a great character study. There are many characters, and DeBernieres devotes care and attention to each of them, developing a pastiche of individualized profiles. DeBernieres humanizes each of these characters (regardless of their ethnic/national identity) without rationalizing their (at times brutal) behavior.

DeBernieres is unique amongst writers in his ability to express moral complexity. Depending on the context, his characters can be heroic or savage, parochial or free-minded. There is an underlying optimism to this book, but there is no naivete.

Finally, this is an elegy to a lost way of life in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is clear that the author understands this culture well, and loves it, but he never lapses into romanticism.

This is a great book.

This is a stunning, engrossing, mind bending work of historical fiction that left me spellbound at the end of its 550 pages. It tells the story of the Great Exchange between the Turks and the Greeks after WWI. This event was one of the greatest disasters in history. But the story starts before that. It not only covers the Gallipoli War during WWI and introduces Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the brilliant founder of modern-day-Turkey, who led the Ottoman Turks to victory against the Allies, but it also follows the Greco-Turkish war. During this war, Smyrna, present day Izmir, the city that I was born in, was burned down. This is a great tragedy because it was one of the most cosmopolitan and popular cities of its times.

Soon after this horrible event, politicians of both countries executed an even worse happening— the Great Exchange, a crazy idea of nationalism whereby all Muslims living in Greece (who considered themselves Greek) had to return to Turkey and all Christians living in Turkey had to return to Greece. Before this population exchange, the Greeks and Turks were so intertwined that some Turks even wrote Turkish with Greek letters. My grandfather who lived during that time had a close Christian neighbor who offered him all his property before he was forced to leave. The effect of this mass exchange was devastating and over a million people lost their homes and their lives as they knew it.

The Greeks and the Turks are still so intertwined. At the Aegean beach town where I spent my summers, you can see the storefronts of the Greek island Chios. And we hear Greek radio because we are so close. My own grandfather was from Crete and then came over to Cyprus, an island that inhabits both Greeks and Turks.

I highly recommend this to my fellow historical novel lovers and especially to my Greek and Turkish friends and those that love Turkey!