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.

Another one for the melancholy Turkish stories collection.

An epic historical novel about a village in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The author uses the experiences of the villagers - Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Armenians - to tell the wider story of the tragedies that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey. There are also vivid scenes depicting the Ottoman experience at Gallipoli and the accidental death of King Alexander of Greece. The characters are described as though they are in a folktale - "Iksander the Potter" "Philothei the Beautiful" - and perhaps the most interesting figure is Leyla, who poses a Circassian concubine then seizes her chance for freedom and an unexpected homecoming. While the novel was absorbing and beautifully written, it was not a page turner and I found the multiple perspectives made it easy to put the down the book and pick it up again the next day. Well worth reading.

I can’t remember the last time I read something so meticulously rendered that I actually felt as if I was watching a movie in my head. Unbelievably beautiful, complex writing with a level of depth and observational power that is as focused as a laser point. You’re thrown head-first into this stunning, vivid, multi-coloured world that you don’t see coming. It was a joy to read every single letter of this book.

A but heavy handed in some spots—at the end the author explains his symbolism, for example, which is a bit disappointing as it is artfully and complexly explored through the text, and it makes you feel as if he doesn’t quite trust you as a reader. However, the parallel plots, foreshadowing, symbols, proverbs, metaphors, and complex characters work together to deliver his ideas beautifully and effectively. A must read, I think.

"Beautiful" is an accurate word to describe this book that hardly does it justice. As a lover of history, anthropology, good storytelling, and especially Turkish culture, this book satisfied me and then some. It is an exceptional portrayal of the struggles that everyday people underwent during the strange time between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the dawn of Atatürk's republic, when superficial lines were drawn up between people who had lived for centuries comfortably next to and around each other. People often forget about the human nature of historical events and the deep cultural ties that these people make and live with, and I thought that de Bernières did an amazing job of portraying this all while remaining faithful to the time period, the culture, and the characters. Not to mention that the language is poetic and enchanting, from start to finish. I know I had teary eyes quite a few times and even delayed the last few chapters as long as possible, just to make the book last a bit longer.

The story of how modern Turkey came to be, as told through the life of a village near Fethiye, Telmessos that was, on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Turkey really is the crossroads of continents, which only means that it has been the marching ground of armies since civilization began. de Bernieres' description of the fighting and the atrocities before, during and after World War I leave you feeling that no matter how horrible was the forced relocation of Greek Turks to Greece and Turkish Greeks to Turkey, it might also have been in some awful way necessary. Levon the Armenian was always going to be "other" in Eskibahce, and, once the Ottoman empire fell, until the Turks either killed or expelled all the "others," there would be no peace there.

There are so many wonderful characters, and so many storylines unresolved. What happened to Drousoula's family? To Daskalos Leonidas Efendi? To Layla Hanim? To Mehmetcik? And then I realized. They were all Greeks. The Turks left behind never knew what happened to their friends. Why should I?

This is a long read but a worthwhile one, especially if you've traveled in Turkey or are going to.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde

John Donne

To destroy

When is it a duty? When is it a right? When is it a sin? What makes one human being violate another’s body and spirit? What makes Cain to pick up the stone? What convinces one man that the death of thousands would make the world a better place? And on the contrary: Who, what and when should we save? Iskander the Potter believes that it is not the individual’s fault and that it is all done by "the great world". And isn’t "the great world" just a combination of myriad small worlds that collide and intertwine over and over again, shaping “the big picture”? The world is shaped by the people who live in it, by their own personal worlds. So yes, everyone is responsible for their actions. However, no one is a lonely island. Inevitably we are influenced by other people and events. How can anyone stay moral in an immoral world? Especially when it is the only way to survive.

"But we are always confined to earth, no matter how much we climb to the high places and flap our arms. Because we cannot fly, we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us. Because we have no wings we are pushed into struggles and abominations that we did not seek, and then the years go by, the mountains are levelled, the valleys rise, the rivers are blocked by sand and the cliffs fall into the sea”

Where does the truth lie, then? What do we stand to lose in the name of what we believe in? What do we stand to lose in the name of what others believe in? When do we go with the flock, when do we sacrifice ourselves? How much are we ready to sacrifice in order to preserve ourselves? Is survival worth all cost? Can anyone truly know how much they are able to bear or is it only in the aftermath that we realize that we might have paid a price too high?

“We are forgetting how to look at others and see ourselves”

It is said that he, who saves one, saves the whole world. Then does he, who destroys one, destroy the whole world? Because we all are the world and everything we do – regardless of its nature – comes back to us. Actually, I don’t believe it ever truly leaves. I believe there are no two people entirely different or entirely alike. What we do to others, we always do to ourselves as well. Because we are all connected. I am all the saints, I am all the sinners. I am the best, I am the worst. I am everyone, everything. I am the whole world. And yet, I am just me. How do we choose between ourselves and the rest of the world? And like this isn’t enough, how do we cope with the multiple sides of our own personalities? Are we all just birds without wings, ruled by "the great world", desperately aiming for the sky, knowing that we would never reach it? Or are we mighty eagles, ready to adjust and rule it as we please?

Who are the victims, who are the predators? Are we shaped by the world that we live in or is it we who shape it and bear the responsibility for its nature? I believe both of those are true. War brings the best and the worst out of people, but in the end we are all the same. Humans. And, as said in "Memoirs of a Geisha", "Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper."

“Don’t pity the eagle
Who can climb the sky and fly
But for the little wingless bird
Cry.

Fire will be found by
Birds that fly too high
And all his feathers burn
And he’ll fall down and die.

What bird has two nests
Only one shall remain
And his wings burn
And he’ll not fly again.

What if I make a high nest
But the branch sinks low?
They will take my little bird
And I will die of woe.

Oh my little bird
Who will chase you?
Who will put you in a cage
And tenderly embrace you?

It’s not possible to light a
Candle that doesn’t drip,
And it’s not possible to love
And never weep.”

Read count: 1

I have an unusual relationship with de Benieres' novels. I loved the lyrical Captain Correlli's Mandolin (the film is a disaster, with Nicholas Cage giving possibly the worst performance in cinematic history), but the novel itself has it all: humour, tragedy, love, war, relationships and history. I enjoyed the wit and colour of The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts. But after three reading swings at The Partisan's Daughter, I eventually struck out on what could only be defined as overly twee masturbation.

Birds Without Wings, despite the hype, is an awful novel. And I'll give some reasons:
1. The setting is a fallacy. Both Greek and Turkish historians acknowledge that the area he has set it in was Greek speaking rather than Turkish (coastal Lycia). He should have set it in Cappadocia if he wanted Turkish speaking Greeks. I know children and grandchildren descended from the region. I also love Ottoman and Turkish history. There's also a strong presence in Australia from both communities. This wouldn't have been so bad, but de Benieres claims to have 'researched' the area. Well he didn't research it at all.
2. It is so earnest in its sentimentality that it reeks. Rather than let the story and characters speak to readers, it beseeches us to get sentimental. The more natural evocation that worked so well in Captain Correlli is absent here.
3. The vignettes never truly build, and we end up with just a series of overly earnest sketches. It ends up being a choppy mess.
4. The language is too twee for the feel of the novel. It's awkward and desperate.

Anyway, that's my opinion, and I think you should ignore subjectivity here, because this is a disastrous tome of a novel, from a writer who can do so much better.

I was in Kayakoy (I believe the fictional town of Eskibace is based upon it) last summer had this book recommended to me by a local.

It's a sumptuous read, written through the eyes of various characters, all of whom are fascinating - and oh-so-human, with their foibles, prejudices and philosophies. The ghastly events taking place in the background inexorably take centre stage, shattering the lives of just about everyone we've met in the book.

I have read a number of books by de Bernieres the first being Captain Corelli's Mandolin, (I enjoyed both the book and the film) I then went on read The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, then The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (two of his Colombian trilogy) which I didn’t particularly enjoy as they were in the magical mystery genre of Gabriel García Márquez, whom Bernières greatly admires. However I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Birds without Wings’ and was blown away by the vast amount of historical research he had undertaken in the writing of the book, which opens in 1900 and ends in the early 1920's.
The book's title is taken from a saying by one of the characters, Iskander the Potter, "Man is a bird without wings, and a bird is a man without sorrows."
"Birds without Wings" is set during the declining period of the Ottoman Empire, in the small Anatolian town of Eskibahce. Despite all the criticisms of the Ottoman Empire, the degree of tolerance between ethnic groups and different religions was quite remarkable. In the small town the mix of Turks, Armenians, and Greeks, both Muslims and Christians, live side-by-side in a comfortable and relatively peaceful existence, often inter-marrying. When the Franks, as the Ottomans called the Western Europeans, and a throw-back to the name given to the Crusaders by Mediterranean Muslims, and then the Greeks invade their country, the harmonious existence of the residents of Eskibahce is torn apart by external events. The Sultan declares a holy war against the invaders. The Muslim Turks are conscripted as soldiers and the Christian Turks are sent into labour battalions. The Armenians are evacuated from the region in a death march, in response to the Armenians helping the Russians to slaughter thousands of Turkish Muslims in other parts of the empire.

We are again reminded of this by the news that the French Senate on 24th January 2012 approved a bill which will make it illegal to deny that the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire was genocide. Cynical French politicians see this move as a way by Sarkozy to gain votes from the 500,000 ethnic Armenian French voters in April’s Presidential elections. This has infuriated the Turkish government, which has threatened France with permanent sanctions. So the events depicted in the book are still having their impact even today.
Going back to the book, during the Balkan wars when the western powers were competing with each other to seize territories formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, the Italians occupy Eskibahce. Then the Christians are forced to relocate to Greece. Throughout it all, the residents struggle to survive amidst the turmoil.
There are some beautifully drawn characters in the book the childhood friends Karatavuk (Turkish for 'Blackbird') and Mehmetcik (Turkish for 'Red Robin'), who are inseparable until war breaks out. Karatavuk becomes a soldier who participates in the battle of Gallipoli, and Mehmetcik, who is forced into a labour battalion. He later defects and becomes a notorious bandit. There is the beautiful Christian girl Philothei, who is engaged to Ibrahim the goatherd and whose death is foreshadowed at the start of the story. There is the landlord and town protector Rustem Bey, who casts out his adulterous wife and takes a mistress. There are Abdulhamid Hodja and Father Kristoforos, holy men who call each other infidels yet are good friends. I found the chapters depicting the life and career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, fascinating as he moves up the military ranks to win the fight for an independent Turkey.
Reverting again to the book’s title I found it interesting that ‘Birds’ are present throughout the story. They sing throughout the night, carry letters to the dead, have their voices captured in clay whistles, and live in cages outside the entrance to many homes. The town residents are portrayed as wingless birds that are grounded in the reality of war and unable to flee the turmoil.

In some ways ''Birds Without Wings'' is quite a challenge for readers having 95 chapters, and a six-part epilogue it's not surprising that de Bernières has cited ''War and Peace'' as a model for his work. In the end, this is a book about mourning, about grief at the loss of a community where Muslims and Christians were more than neighbors, where the imam went out of his way to bless a Christian child and Christians prayed to the Virgin Mary for their Muslim brothers.

Louis de Bernieres won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book, 1995 for Captain Corellis' Mandolin. I doubt whether Birds without Wings will win any kind of prize or much praise.
This is a sprawling novel set against the background of the collapsing Ottoman empire, the Gallipoli campaign and the ensuing struggle between Greeks and Turks that resulted from World War I.
I was overwhelmed by all of this and underwhelmed by the awful cliched ‘narrator’ style employed by de Bernieres. When I read a novel like this, I want the characters to come alive for me. I want to live and breathe and taste and touch with them. I don’t want to feel as if I’ve fallen into some third rate American mobster movie.
I don’t ever want to read another page of what ‘Veled the fat’ or ‘Iskander the Potter’ did or said. I was hoping for a Harry the Hammer to pop up for light relief. I do understand that de Bernieres is trying to capture the essence of the culture here, but leaving out these tags would have cut the book by a good 100 pages and it needs it. Desperately.
Birds Without Wings tries to be both intimate and sweeping. It reflects de Bernieres's obsession with the impact that the madness of war, nationalism and religious fanaticism has on individuals.
I think this is a noble thing to want to achieve in a book.What a pity that the book was so boring and the characters so flat that I didn’t get what the author so obviously wanted me to.