Birds Without Wings
- Book Review,
by LOUIS DE BERNIERES
From Publishers Weekly
It's been nearly a decade since Captain Corelli's Mandolin became a word-of-mouth bestseller (and then a major feature film), and devotees will eagerly dig into de Bernières' sweeping historical follow-up. This time the setting is the small Anatolian town of Eskibahçe, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. The large cast of characters of intermixed Turkish, Greek and Armenian descent includes breathtakingly lovely Philothei, a Christian girl, and her beloved Ibrahim, the childhood friend and Muslim to whom she is betrothed. The narrative immediately sets up Philothei's death and Ibrahim's madness as the focal tragedy caused by the sweep of history—but this is a bit of a red herring. Various first-person voices alternate in brief chapters with an authorial perspective that details the interactions of the town's residents as the region is torn apart by war; a parallel set of chapters follows the life of Kemal Atatürk, who established Turkey as a modern, secular country. The necessary historical information can be tedious, and stilted prose renders some key characters (like Philothei) one-dimensional. But when de Bernières relaxes his grip on the grand sweep of history—as he does with the lively and affecting anecdotes involving the Muslim landlord Rustem Bey and his wife and mistress—the results resonate with the very personal consequences that large-scale change can effect. Though some readers may balk at the novel's sheer heft, the reward is an effective and moving portrayal of a way of life—and lives—that might, if not for Bernières's careful exposition and imagination, be lost to memory forever. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Ever since the invasion of Troy, convulsions in the eastern Mediterranean -- from the Persian wars to Alexander's conquests to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 -- have provided the raw material for epic tales of struggle and sacrifice. In the 20th century, the upheaval that continued that tradition and promised to produce more than one great literary work was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkish nationalism under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Here you had it all: hedonism and decay as the old order crumbled; persecution and genocide as Turkish extremists sought to drive out and destroy millions of Christians in their midst; invasion and occupation as Greek forces, spurred on by their European allies, occupied Smyrna and pushed deep into Anatolia; reversal and resurgence as Kemal revived the battered Turks and drove the invaders back to the sea; betrayal and slaughter as the Europeans abandoned the Christians to the fury of their attackers; and loss and sacrifice as 1.5 million Christians were forced to abandon their ancestral homelands in Anatolia for Greece. For almost a century, many writers, from Franz Werfel (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) to Elia Kazan (The Anatolian), have tried to use this intensely dramatic material to create a literary work worthy of the historical events. It was natural that Louis de Bernières, a master storyteller who knows the eastern Mediterranean well and achieved his greatest success with a novel set in the region, Corelli's Mandolin, should turn to this subject to try to produce an epic novel that would do the turbulent era justice. His new book, Birds Without Wings, to which he has devoted a decade of his writing life, does not quite achieve that goal, but it is a fascinating, evocative work written on a grand scale not much seen today. Despite its flaws, it is as rich and compelling as any novel written about the Anatolian upheaval. Birds Without Wings and Corelli's Mandolin share the same theme -- a peaceful, sun-drenched community shattered by the horrors of war. They also share one character, Drosoula Drapanitikos, the refugee from Anatolia who runs the local taverna in the earlier novel and is the mother of the rebel leader, Mandras. Birds takes Drosoula back to her youth and her ancestral home, Eskibahçe, a town on the Lycian coast known as Paleoperiboli (Old Orchard) in Byzantine times. In this seaside Eden, Christians and Muslims live convivially together, sharing holidays, customs and superstitions and even intermarrying. Although Drosoula has her own tragic story to tell, she serves primarily as the vehicle for recounting the main romance in the novel, the love affair of her childhood friend, the beautiful Christian girl Philothei, and the Muslim goatherd Ibrahim. Drosoula is only one of many narrators in this mosaic of a novel, and Philothei's doomed love affair is only one of several interconnected stories. There is Rustem Bey, the rich landlord, proud of his Circassian mistress but tortured by his love for the unfaithful wife he tried to have stoned to death; the ascetic Greek schoolteacher Leonidas, who spends his nights fomenting plots and writing messages to irredentist groups; the potter Iskander and his son, Karatavuk, who winds up on the Turkish defense line at Gallipoli and witnesses the crushing defeat of Allied forces. But while there are several brilliant set pieces -- the battle of Gallipoli, the expulsion of Christians from their ancestral homes -- as well as enough major characters and story lines to fill three novels, Birds Without Wings does not hang together well enough to be the master work the author intended. For one thing, there are so many characters and interconnected story lines that confusion and repetition are the inevitable byproducts. For another, many of the major characters are so endearing, so knowing, so full of folk wisdom that they are simply not believable. It is hard to accept, for example, that an illiterate potter, thoughtful as he might be, would come up with such an insight as "Destiny caresses the few, but molests the many, and finally every sheep will hang by its foot on the butcher's hook." To add to the confusion, de Bernières scatters throughout the book 22 chapters on the life and career of Kemal Atatürk, the military leader who forged the modern Turkish nation, that have little connection to the other stories he recounts and produce a portrait that verges on hagiography. As a result, the mosaic he has created does not emerge as the grand vision it could have been with tighter editing and a less diffuse narrative. Nevertheless, in his compassionate portrayal of simple people struggling against sweeping historical forces and his vivid descriptions of the cruelties of war, de Bernières has reached heights that few modern novelists ever attempt. While Birds Without Wings can be confusing and meandering at times, it offers a thrilling ride through a whirlwind of history that changed forever a pivotal part of our world. Reviewed by Nicholas Gage Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The ten years since the runaway success of De Bernières’ Corelli’s Mandolin have provided ample time for reviewers to sharpen their pencils. But potshots at his new novel are scarce, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Critics applaud the author’s continued liberties with point of view, but the large cast of characters obscures the narrative focus; many don’t rise above one-note characterization. Other critics argue that the collective power of these voices, not the individual timbre, counts. Where Corelli’s Mandolin was a love story set against the backdrop of war, here the battlefield takes center stage. The Guardian claims that the Gallipoli set piece is “far beyond anything De Bernières has attempted or achieved up to now”—and if you’re willing to taste kadinbudu köfte or iç pilàv and other local flavors, you’ll enjoy the ride. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* With a village in southwest Turkey as a microcosm, de Bernieres (Corelli's Mandolin, 1995) offers an impressive view of this region during the early twentieth century, a tumultuous period marking the end of the Ottoman empire and the birth of the Turkish republic. In Eskibahce, inhabited by a delightful and diverse population, tradesmen make their living, children play happily, and the followers of priest Father Kristoforos and imam Abdulhamid Hodja are friends, with Muslims in distress making offerings to a Christian saint. (Here too Philothei, a Christian girl so distractingly beautiful that she is veiled, is betrothed to Muslim Ibrahim, a love that ends tragically.) But world events intervene, conscripting the men, removing the Armenians, and finally relocating people solely on the basis of religion, tearing apart communities as Christians are sent to Greece and Muslims to Turkey. The true story of Mustafa Kemal, military genius and Turkey's first president, is interwoven with accounts--humorous, horrific (in describing the effects of war), and luminously moving--by and about the people of Eskibahce. De Bernieres' canvas is wide, as he sketches political movements and takes religion and nationalism to task, but his characters' stories are intimate, creating a wonderfully rich and timely epic. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“An absorbing epic . . . It [has] the pleasingly busy feel of a 19th-century classic (it’s no surprise that de Bernières has cited “War and Peace” as a model for his work).”
–New York Times Book Review
“A fascinating, evocative work written on a grand scale not much seen today . . . In his compassionate portrayal of simple people struggling against sweeping historical forces and his vivid descriptions of the cruelties of war, de Bernières has reached heights that few modern novelists ever attempt.”
–Nicholas Gage, Washington Post Book World
“ ‘Birds Without Wings’ is one of the most engrossing novels I’ve read all year . . . A lively and enlivening history and character study and geography and theological accounting all in one . . . The book’s title comes from [the] gnomic statement ‘Man is a bird without wings. A bird is a man without sorrows.’ Sadly, as we read, we learn once again that our species can’t fly. But a novel can soar.”
–Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
“ ‘Birds Without Wings’ remains a quite astonishing, and compulsively readable, tour de force. De Bernières has caught to perfection the slow-paced, richly descriptive, discursive, proverb-laden narrative style characteristic of Balkan and Anatolian storytellers. His subtly differentiated characters attach themselves to us and won’t let go: We come to care about them, and their deaths diminish us . . . [This] novel tells us more about our flawed human condition than is comfortable to know, and that is its greatest strength.”
–Peter Green, Los Angeles Times
“A deeply rewarding work about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire . . . So much is remarkable about this novel, from the heft of its history to the power of its legends . . . 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.”
–Christian Science Monitor
“Humorous, horrific, and luminously moving . . . De Bernières’ canvas is wide, as he sketches political movements and takes religion and nationalism to task, but his characters’ stories are intimate, creating a wonderfully rich and timely epic.”
–Booklist (starred review)
“A long, interesting and sometimes challenging book . . . De Bernières writes dense, fine-grained prose that moves with the measured grace of a 19th century novel.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Enormously readable, intermittently brilliant, honorably conceived and felt.”
–Kirkus
“An absorbing read about a captivating time . . . a rich, poignant story.”
–The Economist
“Louis de Bernières is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.”
–A. S. Byatt
From the Inside Flap
Louis de Bernières’s last novel, Corelli’s Mandolin, was met with the highest praise: “Behind every page,” said Richard Russo, “we sense its author’s intelligence, wit, heart, imagination, and wisdom. This is a great book.” A. S. Byatt placed the author in “the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.” Now, de Bernières gives us his long-awaited new novel. Huge, resonant, lyrical, filled with humor and pathos, a novel about the political and personal costs of war, and of love–between men and women, between friends, between those who are driven to be enemies.
It is the story of a small coastal town in South West Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the people–Christians and Muslims of Turkish and Greek and Armenian descent–whose lives are rooted there, intertwined for untold years. There is Iskander, the potter and local font of proverbial wisdom; Karatavuk–Iskander’s son–and Mehmetçik, childhood friends whose playground stretches across the hills above the town, where Mehmetçik teaches the illiterate Karatavuk to write Turkish in Greek letters. There are Father Kristoforos and Abdulhamid Hodja, holy men of different faiths who greet each other as “Infidel Efendi”; Rustem Bey, the landlord and protector of the town, whose wife is stoned for the sin of adultery. There is a man known as “the Dog” because of his hideous aspect, who lives among the Lycian tombs; and another known as “the Blasphemer,” who wanders the town cursing God and all of his representatives of all faiths. And there is Philothei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherd–a great love that culminates in tragedy and madness. But Birds Without Wings is also the story of Mustafa Kemal, whose military genius will lead him to victory against the invading Western European forces of the Great War and a reshaping of the whole region.
When the young men of the town are conscripted, we follow Karatavuk to Gallipoli, where the intimate brutality of battle robs him of all innocence. And in the town he left behind, we see how the twin scourges of fanatical religion and nationalism unleashed by the war quickly, and irreversibly, destroy the fabric of centuries-old peace.
Epic in its narrative sweep–steeped in historical fact–yet profoundly humane and dazzlingly evocative in its emotional and sensual detail, Birds Without Wings is a triumph.
About the Author
Louis de Bernières’ previous bestselling novels are Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. He lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Editor's Note: At this point in the novel, Yusuf's daughter is pregnant by a Christian, leaving him with only one, terrible course of action...
The Tyranny of Honour
Yusuf the Tall loved all his children equally, with a passionate adoration that, when he thought about it, sometimes made him lachrymose. If his life were like a garden, then his daughters would be like the roses growing alongside its walls, and his sons would be like young trees that formed a palisade against the world. When they were small he devoted happy hours to their entertainment, and when they grew older he hugged them until their eyes bulged and they thought that their ribs would crack. He had grown to love his wife too, partly because this is what happens when a wife is well chosen, and partly because from her loins had sprung these brooks and becks of happiness.
But now Yusuf the Tall did not know what to do with his hands. It seemed as though they were behaving on their own. The thumb and middle finger of his left hand stroked across his eyeballs, meeting at the bridge of his nose. It was comforting, perhaps, for a scintilla of time. There was no comfort longer than that in this terrible situation. Sometimes his hands lay side by side on his face, the tips of his thumbs touching the lobes of his ears. He had thrown off his fez so that they could stroke his hair backwards, coming to rest on the back of his neck. The maroon fez lay in a corner on its side, so that his wife Kaya kept glancing at it. Despite this awful emergency, and the drama in which she was caught up, her instinct was to tidy it away, even if it were only to set it upright. She sat on the low divan, kneading her fingers, biting her lip and looking up at her husband. She was as helpless as one who stands before the throne of God.
Yusuf the Tall strode up and down the room, waving his hands, protesting and expostulating, sometimes burying his face in his hands. Kaya had not seen him so anguished and begrieved since the death of his mother three years before. He had painted the tulip on the headstone with his own hands, and had taken bread and olives so that he could eat at the graveside, imagining his mother underneath the stones, but unable to picture her as anything but living and intact.
Yusuf had passed the stage of anger. The time had gone when these patrollings of the room had been accompanied by obscenities so fearful that Kaya and her children had had to flee the house with their hands over their ears, their heads ringing with his curses against his daughter and the Christian:"Orospu çocu¢gu! Orospu çocu¢gu! Piç!"
By now, however,Yusuf the Tall was in that state of grief which foreknew in its full import the horror of what was inescapably to come. His face glistened with anticipatory tears, and when he threw his head back and opened his mouth to groan, thick saliva strung itself across his teeth.
Overtaken, finally, by weariness, Kaya had given up pleading with him, partly because she herself could see no other way to deal with what had occurred. If it had been a Muslim, perhaps they could have married her to him, or perhaps they could have repeated what had been done with Tamara Hanim. Perhaps they could have kept her concealed in the house, unmarried for ever, and perhaps the child could have been given away. Perhaps they could have left it at the gates of a monastery. Perhaps they could have sent her away in disgrace, to fend for herself and suffer
whatever indignities fate and divine malice should rain upon her head. It had not been a Muslim, however, it had been an infidel.
Yusuf was an implacable and undeviating adherent to his faith. Originally from Konya, he was not like the other Muslims of this mongrel town who seemed to be neither one thing nor the other, getting converted when they married, drinking wine with Christians either overtly or in secret, begging favours in their prayers from Mary Mother of Jesus, not asking what the white meat was when they shared a meal, and being buried with a silver cross wrapped in a scrap of the Koran enfolded in their hands, just because it was wise to back both camels in salvation’s race. Yusuf the Tall regarded such people with disdain. Moreover, it is one of the greatest curses of religion that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies. He had lived serenely among Christians for most of his life, but now that she had despoiled and defiled herself with an infidel, this was the worst in all that tormented him.
Yusuf stopped pacing the room, and at last called his sons together. His other daughters assembled too, standing silent and cowed at the back of the darkened room.
When his sons were before him, Yusuf took his pistol from his sash, weighed it in his hand, took it by the barrel, and handed it to his second son, Sadettin. Sadettin took it by the butt, and looked at it in disbelief. At first his voice seemed to fail him. "Baba, not me," he said.
"I have tried," said Yusuf,"and I can’t. I am ashamed, but I can’t."
"Not me, Baba. Why me?"
"You have courage. Great courage. And you are obedient. This is my command."
"Baba!"
Yusuf beheld the spiritual and moral agony of his second son, and the surprise, but he would not relent.
"It should be Ekrem," pleaded his second son, gesturing towards the first-born. "Ekrem is oldest." Ekrem held out his hands as if to push his brother away, shaking his head vigorously.
"Ekrem will take my place when your mother dies," said Yusuf. "He is the first-born. You are all used to obeying him. He will be head of the family. It is you who must do this thing." He paused. "I command it."
Father and second son looked at each other for a long moment. "I command it," repeated Yusuf the Tall.
"I would rather kill myself," said Sadettin at last.
"I have other sons." Yusuf placed his hand on Sadettin’s shoulder.
"I am your father."
"I will never forgive you," replied his second son.
"I know. Nonetheless, it is my decision. Sometimes . . ." and here he hesitated, trying to name whatever it is that takes our choices away, ". . . sometimes we are defeated."
Yusuf and Sadettin stood facing each other silently, and at the back of the room one of the girls began to sob. Sadettin appealed to his mother; kneeling before her and taking her hands in his, "Anneci¢gim! Annece¢gim!"
Kaya removed her hands from his grasp, and raised them in a small gesture of impotence. She seemed suddenly like an old woman who has turned her back on life.
"I command you," said Yusuf the Tall.
"It will be on your head," exclaimed Sadettin angrily, rising to his feet.
"On my head," repeated Yusuf.
Sadettin entered the haremlik. It was dark because the shutters were closed, and it smelled comfortingly of things feminine and mysterious. In the corner, glowing and glittering with terror in the half-light, he saw the eyes of his sweet sister, Bezmialem, of all his sisters the most gentle, and the one he loved the best.
"Sadettin," she murmured, her soft voice full of resignation. "I thought it would be Ekrem."
"I thought it would be him," said Sadettin.
She glanced at the pistol, placed her hand on her stomach and looked down. "You will kill both of us."
"Yes."
"The child is innocent."
Sadettin felt the pistol grow heavier in his hand. To himself he thought, "I won’t defile my right hand" and he transferred it to his left.
"I am innocent," said Sadettin.
"We are all innocent," replied Bezmialem.
"You are not." He felt a sudden surge of anger. He blamed her for bringing down the shame, and for shutting him in this trap.
"I found something better than honour," she said, her eyes momentarily shining with happy remembrance.
"What is better than honour?"
"I don’t know the name of it. But it is better. It makes me innocent."
Sadettin took his sister’s right hand in his, knelt before her, and touched it to his heart, his lips and his forehead. He kissed it. He tried to suppress his pain, and he bowed his head. "It is not me who does this thing," he managed to say at last. He said it as quickly as he could, so that the words would not be throttled by sorrow and die in his throat.
"It is our father who does this," said his sister. "The injustice isn’t yours."
"May God receive you in paradise," said Sadettin.
"May I see you there," replied Bezmialem.
"May the angels carry you."
"And you when the time comes."
Sadettin raised himself up and realised that after all he would have to defile his right hand. He transferred the pistol, threw his left arm around his sister’s neck and embraced her. They stood
together, trembling. Softly she put her arms around him, as if he were a lover. He felt the soft pulse of her breath on his neck. He placed the muzzle of his pistol against her heart, clenched his eyes shut, muttered, "In the name of God . . ." and fired. He held Bezmialem to him as she choked and the spasms and convulsions overcame her. He thought that they would never end, and the dread came over him that he might have to go out, reload the pistol and shoot her again. For a desperate few seconds he wondered if it might not be possible to take her to a surgeon and save her. At last her head fell on his shoulder, and finally he let her down gently to the floor. He knelt and kissed her, the arc of his motion so familiar because so akin to the rituals of the mosque, and then he rested his forehead on hers.
When Sadettin emerged into the selamlik, his shirt was glistening with the dark blood that his sister had coughed up, and it was as if he had become another man. He threw the gun down at his father’s feet in a brutal gesture of contempt, held his father’s gaze, and wiped his hands so roughly together that they made a sound like clapping. "I have defiled my right hand because of you. I am finished with you all," he said.
"Where will you go?" asked his father.
"Where do the birds go?" asked Sadettin. He gestured in the direction of the Taurus Mountains, rising up from the Elysian coastal plain like a vast and sombre fortress. Behind them stretched the grim plains of the east, where a hard and uncouth people sat silently in the dark for months, doing nothing whilst they waited for the winter snows to melt.
"I am an outlaw," he said. "That is where I will be.With God’s help, I shall not live long."
Sadettin left, taking nothing with him but a musket, and without kissing his father’s hand, or touching it to his forehead, or to his heart.
Shortly afterwards Yusuf the Tall emerged from the house with the pistol restored to his sash, his fez brushed and restored to his head. A small and anxious crowd of people had gathered outside,wondering about the meaning of the shot. They had seen Sadettin leave in a fury, with his musket over his shoulder and the blood on his shirt, and his air of one who would never be able to bear a human touch again.
Ignoring these people,Yusuf set off down the steep and teeming alleyways.
He was affronted by the normality of the town. He stepped over the sleeping dogs, and skirted the kneeling camels. In the distance he could hear the Blasphemer railing against the priest. Little Philothei was being followed as usual by Ibrahim. Her friend Drosoula, as usual, had the devoted Gerasimos in tow. Abdulhamid Hodja rode by on Nilufer, her bells tinkling and her ribbons fluttering. Under his awning, Iskander the Potter worked at his wheel, and raised a lazy clay-caked hand in greeting. The goldfinch of Leonidas twittered in its cage outside the teacher’s door. Ali the Snowbringer led his donkey by, its flanks wet and glistening from the melting packs of ice. Karatavuk in his black shirt, and Mehmetçik in his red, played with stones under a fig tree. To Yusuf, all this ordinariness was like the mockery of God.
He found the two gendarmes playing backgammon together on a table in the shade of the plane trees of the meydan. As the day had grown warmer, so more of the buttons of their tunics had become undone. Both of them were in urgent need of the weekly shave that they would take that evening before Friday began. They looked up, not unduly pleased to be interrupted in their duty to the holy game of backgammon, and pronounced "Hos. geldiniz" in reluctant unison.
"Hos. bulduk," replied Yusuf, adding,"I am sorry to disturb you."
He drew the pistol from his sash, and laid it down gently on the board, so that he would not disturb the pieces. The gendarmes looked up at him in puzzlement and expectation.
"I am a murderer," declared Yusuf gently, "and I have come to offer myself for arrest."
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
