Reviews

When you pick up a book and know it's going to break your heart, but you read it anyway: so it was with Louis de Bernières, "Birds Without Wings". Set in little Eskibahçe, a rural village in Turkey in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, de Bernières explores the ravages that are wrought as a result of nationalism, religion, and Big Ideas. I recently finished Charles King's "Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul" about Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish Revolution. In it he describes the wars, the genocides, the population exchange of the deportation of Greek Christians back to Greece and the forced emigration of Turkish Muslims into Turkey, but they are all discussed at an academic arm's length. de Bernières, instead, centers the reader amid the everyday and imperfect hodgepodge of Eskibahçe where Christians and Muslims live side by side as friends, neighbors, and lovers, sometimes intermarrying and changing religions. Everyone pays tribute to the other's god-- to "back both camels"-- just in case. Life is hard and they can use whatever help they can get. The reader is ensconced among its population: wise Iskander the Potter, proselytizing Leonidas Daskalos, magisterial Rustem Bey, beautiful Philothai, circumspect Imam Abdulhamid Hajid, best friends Karatavuk and Mehmetçik, and others. de Bernières' writing is so transporting (think Tolstoy, Marquez, Vargas Llosa) that whenever I opened the book it felt like a portal back in time, and the townspeople felt beloved to me. He cultivates this relationship to bring home the devastation of world events on an innocent population.

de Bernières uses his beautiful language to show how we all are birds without wings; we cannot fly away irrespective of borders and politics. It's especially hard to read today where the news reminds us how we are like such birds with Israel's "cleansing" of Gaza, Russia's attempt to reclaim Ukraine, and Pakistan's expulsion of Afghanis, among others. It is wearying that history just keeps repeating itself including those who were once persecuted turning around and using the same methods of persecution on others. This book is a warning of the dangers that nationalism, religious fervor, and revolutions can bring-- yes, they bring change, but not necessarily for the better. I am making this book sound like a downer, and it is, but it's also required reading. If history books cannot stop history from repeating itself, then maybe the power of literature can.

ajkhn's review

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3.0

The first half of this book is a beautiful series of vignettes from a small Aegean town at the end of the Ottoman Empire. It's pretty, largely whimsical, and extremely my shit. The second half, about the Balkan Wars, the Great War, and their aftermath, is a downer, of course. But it's also a bit...unseemly, with the author very into blaming the Armenians for their own genocide and having gross things to say about Arab and African soldiers.
So the race politics of the book are not great. And it gets a bit more focused on _how_ awful things are rather than _why_. Which, I suppose its easier to write this book than the one I would have loved to read.
It's not a terrible book. It's a breezy read at time where everyone is a beautiful human unless described otherwise. In a lot of ways, it was what I was looking for over the final months of the summer. But it's not, like, a great book.

ashrafulla's review

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5.0

This book is a must-read, along with about four other books I'm reviewing today. It is A+, a book of force which is so expertly written the images are still etched in my head weeks after I read the book. Karatavuk and Mehmetcik provide the heart of Turkey, the brotherhood that comes from supporting each other and enjoying each other's company. The moment where they meet and each knows that they cannot physically be together but will always be inextricably linked through their flutes is a point where you see what Turkey has had in its past (and can have again).

Ibrahim and Philothei provide the main tragedy of the book, and in this de Bernieres is excellent. He gives Philothei chapters so that we can see her love of Ibrahim as well as her curiosity regarding her beauty. Ibrahim doesn't get a chapter until the end because he didn't really need to say anything until he was scarred by the war, and that chapter is flat-out heartbreaking. It is the maturation of a person from a child of love to a man of insanity, with the child trying to explain to everyone why the insanity has taken over.

de Bernieres does not hold back from blaming people for the travesty of this town. Almost all sects of Turkey are at fault for destroying an idyllic reclusive town. The scene where Rustem Bey saves Levan's daughters is a display of the town's morals getting a slight win over the barbarism of 20th century politics; when it is later revealed what happened to Levan and his compatriots on the march afterwards, we realize that the town has actually lost.

In the end, that is de Bernieres' main message. It is a message of humanity losing not to a cold reality but to the capitulation to power hungry madmen. By believing in the greatness of whatever country was involved (Turkey, Greece, France, Britain, Russia, etc. etc.), people abandoned the love of their neighbors. With that love lost, the town decayed and frayed into a small shadow of its vibrant self at the beginning of the tale.