One of my favorite reads of the year (2020) is truly a remarkable piece of literature.

It presents a cast of fascinating characters with diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. They all live together in a simple village in southwestern Turkey during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Their individual stories are told with great skill, and the characters seem both real and yet possess the charm and depth one would expect from a "classic" novel of yesteryear. In fact, reviews often draw comparisons to Dickens.

However, this is not just a collection of individual tales. It is seamlessly threaded into the larger narrative of history. We witness the wars and ethnic strife, the slow decline of the "sick man of Europe," the Ottoman Empire. The conflicts leading up to and during World War I, and then the subsequent war for independence as Greece attempts to re-establish its long past empire. The brutality and horrors of war, genocide, and the uprooting of people from their lives are vividly portrayed.

Throughout the novel, the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic, also weaves in and out. The stories are a mix of emotions, at times funny, sometimes sad and heartbreaking, but always captivating.

To be honest, having lived in Turkey for a year, I was familiar with many of the cultural and language elements. The author doesn't always translate or italicize Turkish terms, but the context makes them understandable. Ironically, I found myself looking up quite a few English words. The writing is of excellent quality, and I will definitely seek out his other books.

Despite being set in a no-tech backwater village with superstitions and challenges that most of us will never face, the novel manages to connect to the larger human elements. Themes of fate, death, love, hatred are explored, making it feel relevant even to our current lives and history, just as any great novel should. This speaks volumes about the masterful writing and the fact that the human race has not really changed. It is a truly great book.

The last 10% was a lot!

It truly felt as if a significant portion was crammed into that final 10%.

I sincerely enjoyed the stories. They were not only entertaining but also highly educational. I learned a great deal about what took place during the First World War and the subsequent war with the Greeks in Turkey. There was an overwhelming amount of events that occurred, and it was really almost difficult to fully absorb it all. The details and the complexity of the historical context added depth and richness to the narrative.

I absolutely loved the characters and the names of the people in the small village of Eskibahce. Each character had their own unique personality and story, which made them come alive in my imagination. The names added a touch of authenticity and charm to the village, making it feel like a real place with real people. Overall, this was a wonderful reading experience that I will not soon forget.

Before starting to talk about the novel, I find myself obliged to talk about the publishing houses, even if briefly. I cannot simply express my gratitude and wish them more success or hope for the continuation of their beautiful work. Instead, I feel a sense of belonging to this experience. Let's share a warm and hidden connection together. I feel as if their success is my success and their work represents me. As we followed the owners of the house and those who celebrate them with good follow-up before and with them, and in each new edition, we rushed to buy and read it and strive to meet them at the book fair every year as if we had an appointment with them. With the good translations and the enjoyable works, my younger brother and my dear friend participated in following their editions and we shared the news among us about their new ones and we circulated the copy and read it together, so it circulated among us filled with annotations and comments as if the book created another birth by reading and circulating it among us. The reader is happy with such a connection and regrets that among us was a girl who dedicated a worthy part of her life to publishing books and carefully selecting, translating, and writing them. All of this comes out and is directed by a beautiful verse that they took as a slogan and they adorn their books with it, so its pages always become something that the eye enjoys and resorts to in everything that the reader deals with from it, in terms of its diversity, the different paths, topics, arts, and forms. The reader reads the novel, the critic, history, society, travel, and legal studies in the light of His saying, "And those who strive in Our cause, We will surely guide them to Our paths." They and we are the same in that. They strive and work hard with what is in their power of research, excavation, translation, writing, selection, and beautification of the work in all its aspects from printing, production, and care, and we strive with them and work hard, even if it is through reading, trying to understand, assimilate, and change each in its scope and as much as it can. An act that seeks its connection with God and hopes for effort, reward, and guidance from before and after. "We will guide them to Our paths." And may God bless us with light in the darkness of the passing days, the darkness of the ambiguous history, the darkness of the artificial reality, and the darkness of the heinous injustice. The ceiling of the possible, as the engineer Ayman used to say, "God has hidden His secret and brought it to us and to all those He loves with a beautiful answer, and God has written for us with it a meeting."

I return to the novel and say that in general it is a beautiful novel that I enjoyed throughout and at times this pleasure was interrupted many times. Perhaps the most prominent is this hesitation between history and the art of the novel. So I find myself sometimes enjoying the historical events, its heroes, and its events that I do not say are repeated but their features are close with the closeness of the features of Adam's children. Then I return and remember that this is a novel not a history book, so I am a little annoyed and move my eyes looking for the characters that the author created to translate those events and live them and be affected by them. I find them, but unfortunately, I find many of them empty, unable to empathize with them or represent their feelings, perhaps because he was not given enough space to talk or explain himself. This may be due to the abundance of characters that the author began to create, so he was prevented from this expansion for a long time in his writing and was unable to inflate the life in many of his characters. And those who survived this disaster are, to the extreme, those who were given ample speech, so we listened to them and were affected by them like Karatev, for example, unlike Filippo or Ibrahim or Mikhail or many others. This defect in the characters also applied to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and I was reassured by reading a detailed account of him that reveals his personality and speaks about him from the tongue of his situation, the risks of his spirit, the battles of his heart, the ideas of his mind, and his influence by his environment, his family, and what is around him, which reveals to us the hidden reasons that directed his positions and actions. I was reassured by the shyness of his personality narratively and the recreation of it, but unfortunately, those sections came in a very empty and superficial way, and one is convinced by little, which sometimes makes the matter annoying, such as the explanation of his position on religion or the Tarabish. It is not annoying because of what he did but because of the reason and its shallowness. Of course, the reasons should not always be logical and convincing, not superficial and empty, but perhaps what I mean is providing a complete context that justifies those motives and elevates them.

On the other hand, I could not prevent myself from feeling at times that the author is only describing the Ottoman life before World War I with a kind of perfection and the dreamy imagination. He sees in it with the eye of his art a society in which the different groups and nationalities are integrated side by side, which we lack today after our world was shaped by the hand of the national state that wanted each nation to be forced into a position assigned to them by the engineering of hatred and tyranny in what the life of people should be like, where the artificial system and the forced coordination prevail, as if the mixing and the complex hypocrisy are evil and must be gotten rid of. I felt that the author is torn, sometimes surrendering to the current of perfection, then starting in the description of his art, the horizons tremble for him and he yearns for the heart with what was of unity and coordination, then he returns again to say that there were conflicts, battles, injustice, hatred, and aggression among the different groups, as if he does not find a way out of the alternation between the reality as it was and the imagination as he hopes it would be.

And throughout the novel, I could not let my imagination fly far through the Quranic verses about the year of God in defense or about His creation of people as tribes and clans, so that they would get to know each other. Their difference was a ruling that prevailed and did not defend, but it was mercy, wealth, and blessing that pushed people to strive for learning, influence, inspiration, quotation, reception, and giving. Then my thought circulates with the efforts of the wandering human to eliminate this difference with everything that is within his ability and capacity to have a scale of values that he can control as he wishes. This effort that led the Andalusians out of the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing from the land where different nations and religions clashed and mixed, and migrating to a unified and reduced place where the people of the country emigrate and others similar to them take their place, as those in charge see or as happened in the Russian Empire with the emigration of the Muslim Circassians or the emigration of the Germans from all over Europe to their country or the emigration of the Armenians to Syria and many others. In all of that, the emigrants carry hopes of return and keys that they hang and inherit among them for the period they left it and it did not leave their hearts and souls. So did the Greeks and the Turks in the novel, and so did the Andalusians before, and so do the Palestinians today. And behind that is the pain and suffering that mankind endures, men and women, as Alexander Pushkin said, "They manage the matter and decide and implement their rule." As Abu al-Ala said in the past, "They manage affairs without reason, they implement their order and it is called wisdom."
Then the person does not find a refuge from touching the mercy of God and His hand in that pushing and defense that does not end, as those emigrants from every nation and every generation carry with them to where they settled their customs, their heritage, and their nature, and they mix them with the people of the land that they invaded, and they integrate together, and new cultures, ideas, and systems of life are formed. "The living comes out of the dead and the dead comes out of the living." The Creator of the earth and what is on it inherits it from whom He wills of His servants, and we do not have anything to do with the matter.
I return again to the novel and say that whenever the opportunity arose for the characters to show themselves and explain themselves, their natures hardened in the same reader and interacted with them. This is clearly evident in that vivid and powerful description of the disasters and misfortunes of war, especially what happened in the battlefields of World War I and what happened in Gallipoli. The disasters that grip the soldiers and break them with the showers of lead, the huge cannons, the long months in the filthy trenches, and the harsh changing atmospheres. All of this only finds its freedom and kindles its fire in those soldiers who gathered from the different regions of the earth to fight. None of them knows what he is destroying, but they are the fuel of the red hell, the firewood of the excessive desires, the lustful ambitions, and the base quarrels. The author did well in describing that what kindness pleased him, and it happened to my reading of it after reading the book "The Fall of the Ottomans" by Yugin Rogan, which I highly recommend with or before this novel, as he found all the innovation in the history of that period and was very creative according to his historical method in the shyness of the voices of those who lived in that period and were not among the tyrants who held the power. And since it is a historical book, it is a collection of the omissions of history and the novel, and in fact, I prefer it to our novel here, but I like to combine them because in our novel here there is a poetic sense that the reader enjoys from time to time and enjoys it, except for the first one without fault, except that this is what art requires.
I also say that it never occurred to me one day to like or empathize with a literary character named Rustem, but this is what happened here, and the character of Rustem was one of those who were given the opportunity to speak, and the author did well in his description. This hesitation between the height of status, the appearance, the wealth, and the weakness of the soul, its worry, and its avoidance of luck was very effective, and I felt that if I had given him the novel and made the events on the sidelines of his story and its background, it would have increased the pleasure and avoided a lot. This wandering effort in search of the peace of the soul and its tranquility in the shadows of love and its loss and its being torn between betrayal and escape, and which, strangely enough, is unable to repay it with the same, but remains loyal to that love, submitting to it despite everything. This was a beautiful story that deserved more, and an enjoyable character was lost in the storm of the many characters.
There is one last thing, and it is a matter that I am hesitant and hesitant to mention, and it is the language of the translation. It was a very high-level translation, really amazing, and the sharp look in the comparison between the translation of a girl from the Golden Age and our novel here shows a huge effort, a great development, and great care for everything related to the language and printing. It is a beautiful effort that deserves respect and congratulations to the translator and the people of the publishing houses alike. But... and oh, this but... despite the high level of the language in which it was translated, I sometimes found it a bit heavy. I felt that there was something that hindered the translation and its smoothness. I do not mean that there was something wrong with the translation itself, but I mean that the level of eloquence and explanation itself seemed to hinder the interaction with the events or seemed dry when it came to its eloquence. Perhaps I cannot express the matter as it is in my soul, but I was very impressed by the internal contradiction between my admiration for the level of the language and my dissatisfaction with its position in the novel and my feeling that there was something that worried me. In any case, perhaps this is due to me and from me, and there is no blame on the translation or the original text, or perhaps this was basically the style of the author, as I found some foreign reviews indicating that. I don't know... and whatever it was, it was an enjoyable experience, reading, interacting, criticizing, analyzing, and feeling. So, thanks again to the publishing houses and the translator, and always looking forward to the new from them.

4.5 stars.

This is an incredibly interesting, humorous, yet also sad and tragic historical fiction novel that is mostly set in a small town in Turkey in the early 1900s.

The story is filled with a diverse cast of fascinating characters. There's Islander, the talented potter who creates unique bird whistles that seem to have a life of their own. Then there's Leyla, the mistress of the town's richest man, Rustem Bey, whose complex relationship adds an element of drama. Philothei, the beautiful Greek Ottoman, brings a touch of elegance and mystery to the narrative. And Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish military leader, plays a significant role in the events that unfold.

The novel also provides a well-told account of the Allied failed invasion of Turkey from the Turkish perspective. The author's excellent storytelling skills make this a truly engaging and memorable read.

Highly recommended, especially for readers who enjoyed 'Corelli's Mandolin'. They are sure to find this novel an equally satisfying reading experience.