Welcome to Istanbul, the magical, mystical portal to the East. What once was the home to an empire that sprawled from the Caspian Sea to Spain and the Atlantic Ocean now sits like a bride in her boudoir awaiting an answer from her latest suitor. Turkey has applied for membership in the European Union, but there has been a lot of foot-dragging over their human rights record. Part of the problem centres around the author of this book being threatened with imprisonment for writing what the government referred to as anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkey has long walked a line between the East and the West that she once both ruled with an iron fist. When the borders of the Ottoman Empire retracted back to modern Turkey with the loss of the Middle East at the end of World War I, Istanbul once more became the end of Europe and the beginning of the mysterious East.
Today we know of Turkey as the fiercely secular state, where the populace protests if the government even gives the appearance of merging church and state. How much different is the Istanbul of today from the Istanbul of the 1990s when Orhan Pamuk first wrote The Black Book? You might as well ask how much has the city changed since the times of the Crusades or later when the Saracens of the Ottoman Empire pushed the infidels back to where they came from.
Istanbul always strikes me as one of the timeless cities, with nooks and crannies where the dust of history lays thick, shoulder to shoulder with cars of chrome and bright paint. The Black Book in a new translation reissued by the Vintage International imprint of Random House makes that more than clear, as the city is more than just a setting, and becomes a character in her own right.
A brief synopsis of the story is deceptive in its simplicity; the lead character Galip, finds a nineteen-word message from his wife declaring she's left him. At the same time her older stepbrother, the famous newspaper columnist Celal has also disappeared. Have they vanished together or is their joint vanishing act nothing more than a bizarre coincidence?
Galip's search for Ruya takes on all the attributes of the cheap detective novels she loves and he despises. Chasing down the ghosts of her past, her leftist existence with her ex-husband leads him onto the trail of secret utopian societies. That they may have only existed in the minds of those who wrote about them in pamphlets and broadsides simply adds to the surreal quality with which he has imbibed the search. Through it all, he plays out a charade to sustain the illusion that she has not left him, but is home sick in bed.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!