Intimate tales beautifully elucidate a richly heroic, romantically sensuous Turkish heritage.
Elegantly composed vignettes exploring Turkish life and nationality during and just after WWII, by émigré author Farhi (Children of the Rainbow, 2002, etc.).
Two decades after 1919, the year Ataturk founded the modern Turkish republic, the generation depicted here still keenly experiences the uncertainties involved in the attempt to define Turkish identify. A different youthful voice narrates each of the interlinked stories, which follow the divergent fates of a group of middle-class, fairly well-educated childhood friends in Istanbul. “In the Beginning” introduces us to Rifat, a fat boy excluded from the neighborhood gang, who recounts the tragic death of his best friend’s tomboy sister. Gül can’t live with her awful prophetic gift, which enables her to foretell the Erzincan earthquake of 1939 and the fate of the Jews in death camps. (Among the group of friends are some Dönme Jews, people who have ostensibly converted to Islam but still practice Judaism in secret.) Robbie, a Scottish boy whose father works in the British embassy, narrates “A Tale of Two Cities.” He recounts a daring, foolhardy attempt by a few of the boys to save one gang member’s Jewish relatives in Salonica, where they are threatened with annihilation by the Nazis. In “Half-Turk,” neighbor and girlfriend Selma writes letters to Bilal, who has been missing for a year since he attempted to sneak fake passports for his relatives into Salonica. Her subject is the disastrous national policy established during the country’s uneasy period of neutrality: Varlik, the imposition of taxes on non-Muslim businessmen. Mustafa’s erotic tale, “Rose-Petal Jam,” brings the multiethnic group to boarding school in Bebek as disciples of their adored literature teacher. In a grand experiment in cosmopolitanism, 13 of the boys become devoted lovers of a local woman, who initiates them into the paradise of sex.
Intimate tales beautifully elucidate a richly heroic, romantically sensuous Turkish heritage.Pub Date: June 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-764-X
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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