A review by madtraveler
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières

5.0

One of my favorite reads of the year (2020). A cast of fascinating characters of different religious/cultural backgrounds who live together in a simple village in southwestern Turkey during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Their stories themselves are well told and the characters are both real and yet the sort you find in one of those "classic" novels of yesteryear. (Reviews often mention Dickens.) But all of this is threaded into the larger story of history, the wars and ethnic strife, the slow death of the "sick man of Europe," the Ottoman Empire. The conflicts right before and through World War I and in then on to the subsequent war for independence as Greece swept in with hopes of re-establishing their long past empire. Brutality is not in short supply, horrors of war, genocide, and ripping people from their lives to send them to war, deaths, or a new country where they no longer fit in. And throughout the novel the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic. The stories are at times funny, sometimes sad and heartbreaking, and always fascinating. To be fair, I lived in Turkey for a year so many of the cultural and language elements were familiar. The author doesn't always translate or even italicize Turkish terms but context makes them clear enough. Ironically, I found myself looking up a good number of his English words. The writing is excellent and I will seek out his other books. Despite being set in a no-tech backwater sort of village with superstitions and challenges most of us will never face, the novel connects to the larger human elements, themes of fate, death, love, hatred, making it feel so perfectly relevant even to current living and history -- as any great novel should. That says as much about the masterful writing as it does about the human race never really changing. Great great book.