Rich, complex, and pulsing with urban life: one of this gifted writer’s best.
Nobel laureate Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence, 2009, etc.) sets a good-natured Everyman wandering through Istanbul’s changing social and political landscape.
Tricked by his scheming cousin Süleyman into writing impassioned love letters for three years to Rayiha, Mevlut finds himself eloping with the older sister of the girl whose dark eyes intoxicated him at a relative’s wedding. (Süleyman gave him the wrong name because he wanted the beautiful youngest for himself.) This being Turkey in 1982, and Mevlut being easygoing in the extreme, rejecting a woman who has compromised herself by agreeing to run away with him is unthinkable. The young couple prove to be well-matched and quite happy, although Mevlut doesn’t make much money. His checkered day jobs in food services, selling rice with chickpeas from his own cart and ineffectually managing a cafe among them, give the author a chance to expatiate on Istanbul’s endemic corruption, both municipal and personal. Pamuk celebrates the city’s vibrant traditional culture—and mourns its passing—in wonderfully atmospheric passages on Mevlut’s nightly adventures selling boza, a fermented wheat beverage he carries through the streets of Istanbul and delivers directly to the apartments of those who call to him from their windows. Although various characters from time to time break into the third-person narration to address the reader, this is the only postmodern flourish. If anything, Pamuk recalls the great Victorian novelists as he ranges confidently from near-documentary passages on real estate machinations and the privatization of electrical service to pensive meditations on the gap between people’s public posturing and private beliefs. The oppression of women is quietly but angrily depicted as endemic; even nice-guy Mevlut assumes his right to dictate Rayiha’s behavior (with ultimately disastrous consequences), while his odious right-wing cousin Korkut treats his wife like a servant. As Pamuk follows his believably flawed protagonist and a teeming cast of supporting players across five decades, Turkey’s turbulent politics provide a thrumming undercurrent of unease.
Rich, complex, and pulsing with urban life: one of this gifted writer’s best.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-70029-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
