“The people who remained in this place have often asked themselves why it was that Ibrahim went mad. I am the only one who knows, but I have always been committed to silence, because he begged me to respect his grief, or, as he also put it, to take pity on his guilt.”

Set in southwestern Anatolia (today Turkey) before and during World War I, Birds Without Wings is a wonderful novel about a small village and the people who live there. Prior to the war, the community is made up of Muslims and Christians, who live peaceably together. We have Ibrahim, a young Muslim boy who loves the beautiful Christian girl named Philothei. They plan to marry, but the war will forever change their lives and the lives of everyone in their village.

This was the first book I’ve read of Louis De Bernieres (who also wrote the notable Corelli’s Mandolin). To say I was impressed in an understatement. It is nearly the perfect novel. The characters are engaging and unforgettable. The story is riveting. The writing is so eloquent – few authors ever achieve such brilliance. And to top it all off, De Bernieres includes some very real history of an area that most of us (myself included), know very little about. Birds Without Wings is now added to my “favorites” list! 4 1/2 stars!

Although I enjoyed the historical context of this novel there is unrelenting sexism in this book which I found extremely off-putting. Each female character is defined solely by the way that she looks and/or her relationship with her husband. Philothei is ridiculously two-dimensional, not only the men in the town but her best friend and even she herself can find no other quality in her other than her good looks. The male characters, without exception, feel no shame in their feelings of superiority over the women in the community and seemingly continuously offer disparaging and offensive remarks.
The violence towards women in the this novel therefore makes uncomfortable reading.
If this book were not so unnecessarily long I would consider re-reading it with a highlighter pen to mark every negative representation of women and I am sure my pens would repeatedly run out of ink.

That rumbling sound just over the horizon is a stampede of giant novels set to arrive in a cloud of publicity. Pity the midlist author who pushes a new book into the path of this horde next month. To the extent Hollywood rises or falls on Thanksgiving weekend, publishers are concentrating more and more of their big literary novels in the fall, a self-destructive tendency sure to overwhelm the nation's shrinking body of readers (and newspaper book sections). If, as Calvin Trillin observed, the average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt, we're about to see some major spoilage.

That would be a shame because from the first novel to arrive this looks like a particularly good season. "Birds Without Wings," by Louis de Bernières, is a deeply rewarding work about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It's both exotically remote and tragically relevant in our age of confident nation-building.

As he did in his bestselling "Corelli's Mandolin" (1994), de Bernières roots his examination of the byzantine complexity of history in the life of a small town. For generations, Christians and Muslims have lived harmoniously in Eskibahçe, a fictional coastal village carved into a hillside in what we now call Turkey. The novel opens in 1900, on the eve of political and social calamities that no one could possibly imagine, least of all these simple folk, whose lives have more in common with 1500 than 1950.

One by one, they tell their stories - short, simple scenes that gradually cut new facets in the hard substance of world history. "With us there has been so much blood," Iskander the Potter says in the first paragraph, but it's easy to ignore that warning as he and his neighbors describe the everyday joys and trials of their lives as though these were the riffs of some Ottoman Garrison Keillor.

There's young Philothei, a Christian girl so beautiful she must wear a veil to quell quarrels in the town. And Ibrahim, her betrothed, who can "mimic the stupid comments of a goat in all its various states of mind." Karatavuk and Mehmetçik play among the hills, endlessly blowing their bird whistles and flapping their arms. The proud Christian priest accepts "offerings from Muslims who were anxious to hedge their bets with God by backing both camels." Ali the Snowbringer lives with his asthmatic donkey in the trunk of a tree. And Levon, the Armenian pharmacist, graciously helps the Muslim drunk who once assaulted him in the street.

These are often charming, even comic stories, but they're quickly forced to contend with stunning scenes of violence. "It is one of the greatest curses of religion," de Bernières writes, "that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbors who have loved each other into bitter enemies."

That twist turns fathers against daughters and husbands against wives, slicing through ligaments of affection in one haunting chapter after another. With his presentation of this ecumenical community, de Bernières suggests that these eruptions of domestic violence - tragic as they are, motivated by pride and religious absolutism - can be controlled and minimized by the essential goodwill of reasonable people who know one another well.

But "Birds Without Wings" maintains a bifocal vision. One eye stays focused on the village, while the other sees nations foolishly slipping toward World War I. Among the scenes of life in little Eskibahçe, de Bernières interjects blood-soaked snapshots of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the chaotic ascension of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey. With wry disgust, he races through revolutions and counterrevolutions, massacres and deportations, the craven interference of European powers and their disastrous passivity, atrocities reflected endlessly in the mirror of revenge.

It's often difficult to follow the swift crosscurrents of this complex period, but de Bernières's thesis is strikingly clear: "History," he writes, "is finally nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from hacked flesh in the name of great ideas."

Eventually, of course, obscurity can protect Eskibahçe no longer. The rabid demands of fanatics who know nothing of this delicate town rain down upon it, fertilizing sectarian strife that these people had managed to hold in check for centuries. Again and again, we see the way reckless acts by vain leaders function as the flutterings of that proverbial butterfly that incites a hurricane far away. Friend is set against friend, neighbor against neighbor, always against their true will. With his unfailingly wise perspective, de Bernières notes, "The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race."

Karatavuk, one of the Muslim boys who played so happily with his Christian friend, takes us into the smoke of trench warfare with all its ghastly farce and startling moments of compassion. His burning faith in the jihad is slowly smothered by the senseless horrors he witnesses and commits. "It is only people like me," he writes, "who wonder why God does not do just one good miracle, and make the world perfect in an instant."

So much is remarkable about this novel, from the heft of its history to the power of its legends. In this great bazaar of family life and international politics, the bittersweet metaphor of "birds without wings" grows deeper and richer. The people of Eskibahçe are blessed with soaring aspirations, but like all of us they must live firmly on the ground, forced to cope with one another and the earthquakes of history. This epic about the tragedy of borders is likely to cross all borders, moving readers everywhere as it describes the harrowing cost of remaking faraway places in the image of our dreams.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0824/p1...

Since I only got to page 181 and then DNF, I will not rate this.

The writing is exceptional and in that high count, lyrical to fine drawn and ethnic specific characterizations well done- long word count copy style. The style that many other readers find most masterful and nearly poetic in flows. But that in this context of story and characters have left me nearly numb.

The place and the people seem so petty, mean-spirited and tied up in multiple traditional minutia of every ilk (religion being only 1 of the categories of crux judgments)- that as quirky and interconnected as these individuals/ families seem? The pace and the content is not for me. Plodding along is fast compared to the speed of my interest levels within the various scenarios. The manner and methods of characterization seem quite well done. Regardless, both my enjoyment factors or historical interest just can't keep up to the effort required. My fault- and this is not the first time I have come to cross patches with this author for quite similar reasons.

Most readers will give this high marks for the writing skill and the complexity of the culture and military wars that proceeded for all these "neighbors" as it digs quite deep for the context of telling. But it's just not a preferred style for me to read, nor is the subject matter intriguing to me in the situations posited.

I probably would have finished despite this because of that historic aspect of genocide and war so seemingly overlooked since it happened. But there were just too many pages of details about customs and feelings effusions (like that exhumation of her mother's bones section) that just plain turned me off to more effort.

This was the best book I've read this year. It was a very satisfying read for me, exactly what I have been searching for. Most of the first half of the book is about life in picturesque small village in south west Anatolia. The first event of note in the story happens in 1900-the birth of Philothei, the most beautiful Christian girl. This is a village that is home to Christians, Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, and Jews. They are all friends and each ask the other to pray for them. They respect the icons and religious leaders of the other faiths. Ibrahaim is betrothed to Philothei as children because they were "born married", it was understood that Philothei would convert to Islam when she married. It was a warm, engaging story of life in that area of the world, narrated by the main characters from the village. Alternate chapters followed the rise of Mustafa Kemal and then the horrors of the Balkan wars. This was an educational book for me because I had no idea how much I didn't know about the Balkan wars which resulted in the birth of modern Turkey. I gave Birds Without Wings a 4 because of the prose, the characters, the stories, and the pacing. The reason I did not give it a a 5 is I felt that towards the last fourth of story Berniers offered too much history of the wars. He started giving enough to inform the story and point the reader towards a deeper search outside the book, but then devoted whole chapters to the machinations of Kemal, the acts of each country involved and for me it bogged down the flow of the story. The passages narrated by the boys from the village were very interesting and heart wrenching, but the list of dates, names, battles was too much for this story. I would still highly recommend this book to lovers of Historical Fiction, stories of war and, those interested in the development of Turkey.

Gimme more sweeping historical novels plz

an amazingly touching story of life in a village in Asia Minor at the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Ataturk, how war changes young people, and the destruction, vicious devastation of the previously wonderful, multicultural city of Smyrna. He writes beautifully - folks (even the fictitious ones) are real and i felt their pain and confusion.
how Turkey (one of the most progressive Islamic countries, especially around Istanbul) came to be, win against the Allies at Gallipoli - thus avoiding being parceled out to the remaining colonial powers, and sadly, how genocide here began (Armenians, Greeks on Turks and Turks on Greeks).

I tired, I did try, and I wanted to like and indulge myself in this book. But it was self-indulgent shite. Perhaps de Berniers was writing this and was totally encapsulated by the little world he was creating, the “subtle” political and religious humour, always tempered and measured. I just became so irritated with the pretension of it all, Iskander The Potter and all that baloney. Chapters entitled "Karatuvuk Remembers (3)". Wank. A waste of holiday time, but I can’t help but thinking I should give it one more chance to see if I’m missing something.

Everyday, every single day there are those heart-breaking stories of people fleeing their countries, by road, crossing razor sharp barbed wire fences.
People fleeing in flimsy rubber dinghies, being caught in storms and waves, toddlers dying, flung on shores, beautiful lifeless dolls.

Heartbreaking, just heartbreaking...

And then my mind races to the beautiful, beautiful ‘Birds Without Wings’.
My mind moves with anguish to the turn of the Century, to the Ottoman Empire with its freedom of religion and to the tiny Anatolian town of Eskibahçe, ‘The Garden of Eden’.

In Eskibahçe, Turks, Greeks and Armenians live in relative peace. If the Imam’s wife felt that she had problems she ran to Philotei’s Mother a Greek.
‘Please pray to the Panagia for me...’ and without hesitation Philotei’s Mother says
‘Yes of course Sister’ rushing to make a small offering to the Panagia.

Like any other small town, Eskibahçe has all types of people, in addition to the multifarious races and creeds.
We have Iskander the Potter, who fashions bird-whistles, filling them with water, so that they gurgle and warble when played.
Iskander the Potter not only loves quotations, but makes up his own too...
'Man is a bird without wings, and a bird is a man without sorrows'

The two little friends, Karatavuk the Turk and Mehmetcik the Greek go about in red and black waistcoats, gurgling and warbling like birds, inseparable until war breaks out.
They are now, even as teenagers conscripted to fight this ‘Holy War’.
Karatavuk, participates in the battle of Gallipoli in the name Allah. Mehmetcik, is forced into a labour battalion because although an Ottoman, he cannot fight for his Motherland simply because he is a Greek Christian... sick to the pit of his stomach, he defects and becomes a notorious bandit.

From the day Philothei was born, everyone marveled at her beauty, but Beauty always comes at a price as Philothei realises when as a teenager every man old or young, could not take his eyes off her and Philotei has to wear a scarf to cover her face.
Philothei however, has eyes only for Ibrahim who even as a young boy followed Philotei everywhere. They are engaged to be married, with no impediment from either family for such marriages were common in Eskibahçe.
The War however, takes away their Joy...

Rustem Bey, the exceedingly handsome and rich landlord and town protector, tolerates his adulterous wife, Tamara Hanim, for a long time and then casts her out to be stoned enthusiastically by Muslims, as well Christians.
Feeling a certain loneliness he takes up a mistress, Layla who as time moves on loves him dearly, she later flees to Greece her homeland, that she had left such a long time ago.
Oh to speak in Greek, she exclaims, but weeps inconsolably when she writes Rustom Bey a farewell letter. These little round circles on her letter are tear drops realises Rustom Bey.

Abdulhamid Hodja, the Imam, who loves his horse Niloufer, talks to her, dresses her mane with little braids, ribbons and little bells. When the army takes Nilofer away, Abdulhamid Hodja dies slowly and sadly of a broken heart.

Father Kristoforos, depends on his meager congregation for sustenance, both holy men who call each other infidel, yet are good friends.

The various cultures, habits blend with each other and life in Eskibahçe is quite peaceful until the
War comes...

War the great Interrupter.

Just when things are going on quietly and peacefully, the lives of the inhabitants of Eskibahçe are torn apart by World War I, Turkey’s subsequent war with Greece, the Armenian genocide and the forced exile of Turkish Christians to Greece and of Muslim Greeks to Turkey.

War and carnage go hand in hand, the utter waste of lives, the brutality of the troops towards civilians in the name of religion and ethnic superiority is unbearable, summed up;

“In the long years of those wars there were too many who learned how to make their hearts boil with hatred, how to betray their neighbours, how to violate women, how to steal and dispossess, how to call upon God when they did the Devil’s work, how to enrage and embitter themselves, and how to commit outrages even against children. Much of what was done was simply in revenge for identical atrocities...”

In the end who was the better?

The Christians? The Muslims? They were just people in a barbaric war.

They went one better in committing atrocities; Christians butchered, maimed, raped and pillaged the Muslims.
The Muslims butchered, maimed, raped and pillaged the Christians, forever repeating the vicious cycle that is history repeating itself.

The Gallipoli campaign, commemorated by the ANZAC Day on 25 April 1915, as a national day to honour those who have served their country in World War I.

Strangely although bitter enemies ... after sometime the Turkish troops and the ANZACS share a strange comradeship, after all they share the same appalling hardships too, trenches filled with water, lice on every part of their bodies...hiding in every crevice, food gone bad and the thousands of soldiers dying not from war injuries but from diarrhea.
Strangely there is a growing fellowship and respect between the Turkish and the ANZACS. They start playing games; they tease each other, and as with all prolonged battles, bond with each other as well.

"Those heroes that shed their blood
And lost their lives.
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
Here in this country of ours.
You, the mothers,
Who sent their sons from far away countries
Wipe away your tears,
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace
After having lost their lives on this land they have
Become our sons as well."

The warm sentiments between Turkish and Australian nations were best voiced in the message of the Great Leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which was sent to the Australian and New Zealander mothers in 1934.
Taken from Wikipedia.

The Forced exodus of Armenians in 1915...
The subsequent Armenian genocide...
The expulsion of Greeks from Turkey and of Muslims from Greece after the signing of the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” in 1923...
Is the History of Politicians, safely ensconced in their plush offices, drinking champagne, smoking cigars, huge maps on their walls with red flags indicating enemy positions, arbitrary treaties for the betterment of Nations, for ethnic cleansing.
The long marches with people displaced from their homes and countries where they had lived for centuries, leaving behind their comfortable homes, their gardens, their pets, their dead in cemeteries, for some unknown land where they would live with people of same ethnic origin, and who supposedly would speak their language.
People, women even pregnant ones, children, babies, marching in all types of weather, thousands upon thousands dying on the way, sometimes brutally murdered, raped, the carnage, the atrocities executed upon women and children, these are stories of common people in a War.

Who should we mourn for then?

Should'nt we mourn the brutality that Men of all faiths are capable of inflicting on their fellow Human beings?

For this is what War does...

History in a Novel, my favorite subjects, written in the most breath taking way, that urges me to recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about the transition period between the Ottoman empire to the Republic of Turkey, and to understand the Turkish people's feelings, way of thinking regarding ethnicity complications and international relations ............. This is the most interesting book i have ever read so far.

This book was recommended by my friend Chris. The story is set in a small, poor town in the Anatolia part of Turkey, before, during and after WWI and including the Turkish war for independence. I do not know much about the time or region. The author provided a lot of historical narrative, which was both annoying and helpful. Basically, there were chapters that consisted of descriptions of government actions, troop movements, wars, death-marches, etc that were occuring all around the region during the time. Meanwhile the story was about the inhabitants of this community... what they did,... how they interacted,.. describing their aspirations... and showing the catastrophe that occured when the Ottoman Empire disappeared. The book is about labels that people apply for personal life and their consequences...... A man was asked what would happen to his Christian daughter when she married a muslim.... answer: she will become a Christian-Muslim. At the same time they were aware and wary of the differences among them. The differences were long standing. The Christians were descendents of Greeks who had settled there. They no longer knew Greek but spoke Turkish. The curious aspect of this town was that the people who could write, did so using Greek letters but they wrote in Turkish. People in other areas were perplexed by this contradiction.

But the differences had grave consequences outside the town --- the story described children as they grew up then followed their duty as citizens of the Ottoman empire to join the holy war that was WWI. Numerous contradictions appeared..... The loyal Chrisian Ottomans wanted to fight but were rejected because it was a holy war against Christians. The Muslim boys who joined this Muslim fatwa discovered their major ally was Germany... Christian. --- Meanwhile, the Christian boys who were turned down as soldiers were taken into labor battalions to support the troops. But it turned out that these were slave labor camps. ---- Basically, these were the horrors that preceeded the horror of WWII. When Hitler justified his treatment of Jews, Gypsys and Slavs, he did so by pointing out that no one remembered the holocausts of WWI.... Turks on Armenians, Greeks on Turks, Turks on Greek Christians. People were uprooted and sent to new villages based on their religions. Communities lost their skilled people. Christians speaking Turkish were taken to Greece. Muslims speaking Greek were taken to Turkey. Walking. Some of them made it.

I know this is rattling. I liked the writing. I liked the descriptions of the people. I know Australians who have told me about Gllipoli and this book tells the other side. If anything, this telling is worse because this describes the insanity of trench warfare on the penninsula. It was much more than idiotic charges, ordered by British officers to ANZAC troops, into machine guns.

I am still thinking about the book. The story is sad and profound. A side story is told about Mustafa, the creator of the Turkish State. He came up through the military. He wanted to create a secular Turkish/Muslim state. The Ottoman Empire was fading. To replace it he used nationalism and religion. Those seemed the most effective tools. --- And the counterpoint is this village that was in the process of evolving away from those narrow views. Couldn't it have been done some other way? Maybe not. The last chapter of the book describes a modern village in Anatolia... very civil. But there are no Greek descendents... just as there are no Muslim descendents in Greece. People are happy. But.... It is not really restoration... it is loss.

In the beginning of the book, one of the villagers makes up... or remembers a proverb.... "A man without a soul is like a bird without wings". Birds come up throughout the book in various uses. But at the end of the book, one of the characters ponders the birds... as he had done as a child with his pals..... how nice it would be to be a bird and fly. To be free, to soar, to see everything from the sky. He thinks that birds without wings would be sorry creatures.. colorful but hopping on the ground, going nowhere, vulnerable.

At the same time the birds in the book have sorry fates. They are admired but in admiration they are caged, tamed, hunted, copied imperfectly through whistles or airplanes.

Clearly, I am not done thinking about the book. It is a time and place I do not know. Unfortunately the story is a familiar one in history. But the charming description of the people and town will stay in my memory a long time. I recommend the book. The people are charming. There are friendships. Romances. Quirky people. A fair amount of historical fiction. But it is not a light read.

Extraordinarily rich characters that are worth the effort to get straight. Must read for understanding of multiculturalism and the horrors of war and political division.