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A review by curlypip
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières
3.0
It’s too hard to review! There’s some beautiful writing, believable characters and plenty of history to learn, but, the scope of the book is so vast that it’s easy to lose the storyline.
The story is told from the point of view of many different characters from a village in Turkey where Christians, Jews and Muslims, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and others, had lived peacefully for generations. As the region descends into one war after another leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey, these characters’ lives are ripped apart, leaving them as powerless as birds without wings.
It’s an epic story; and one that’s especially hard to read knowing what’s happening in the world right now.
The scenes set in the trenches in Gallipoli and the chapters from the point of view of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were too long for me; and it made me feel like I was reading a history textbook rather than a novel set in the region. Some background was necessary, but not so much. I needed more from the individual characters
The story is told from the point of view of many different characters from a village in Turkey where Christians, Jews and Muslims, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and others, had lived peacefully for generations. As the region descends into one war after another leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey, these characters’ lives are ripped apart, leaving them as powerless as birds without wings.
It’s an epic story; and one that’s especially hard to read knowing what’s happening in the world right now.
The scenes set in the trenches in Gallipoli and the chapters from the point of view of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were too long for me; and it made me feel like I was reading a history textbook rather than a novel set in the region. Some background was necessary, but not so much. I needed more from the individual characters