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A review by mattdube
The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Özdamar
3.0
This was another one I picked up off the new release wall, kind of curious about Turkish culture and all that, and this one, ostensibly about a young woman who is an economic migrant to Berlin, was close enough to what I know from reading Pamuk that I thought I might like it.
And I do like it, but I feel like it's too very different books, sort of stuffed together. The stuff in Berlin is all in the first half, which is kind of a book about finding love and following art in the late sixties in Berlin. It reminded me a little of the second part of Persepolis mixed with a little of the Highsmith I read. It's got some funny takes on morality and the main character's desire to lose her virginity, it's got strong characters who are very idiosyncratic and has some great set pieces. The first section of that part of the book is great-- these weird little lyrical sections that are beautiful and strange and give voice to a collective experience, a we, as often as they do to a singular speaker. The later two chapters aren't as good-- there are attempts to be artful, like the weird conceit of people in love doubling, sort of to show how you watch yourself when you're in love, but I felt that awkward; if it worked, I would love it, but here I didn't feel it did work.
The second half of the book sees narrator return home to Istambul and become radicalized as the country does. The poetic lyricism of the first section is mostly abandoned to make room for the politics, which are no doubt admirable but a little trenchant-- the narrator is left-socialist, but that's a hard story to tell from this distance, because it doesn't turn out well-- the last chapter is about the crackdown, about the torture of artists and students and police leaving bloody footprints, and you really can't come back from that, nor do things get any better, really. It's just a slog.
I believe in the portrait, btw; It feels very real, and it's a chapter of history, greater Europe's reaction to the student movements of the sixties and seventies that I feel more and more like I don't understand, and I'm always interested. But it really does feel like a totally different book than the one I read under the same cover. And it's a book that I don't think I like quite as much.
So, a good book, but one that works a bit at cross-purposes, at least to me, and one in which the political commitments are no doubt sincere, but left unresolved by the book's conclusion.
And I do like it, but I feel like it's too very different books, sort of stuffed together. The stuff in Berlin is all in the first half, which is kind of a book about finding love and following art in the late sixties in Berlin. It reminded me a little of the second part of Persepolis mixed with a little of the Highsmith I read. It's got some funny takes on morality and the main character's desire to lose her virginity, it's got strong characters who are very idiosyncratic and has some great set pieces. The first section of that part of the book is great-- these weird little lyrical sections that are beautiful and strange and give voice to a collective experience, a we, as often as they do to a singular speaker. The later two chapters aren't as good-- there are attempts to be artful, like the weird conceit of people in love doubling, sort of to show how you watch yourself when you're in love, but I felt that awkward; if it worked, I would love it, but here I didn't feel it did work.
The second half of the book sees narrator return home to Istambul and become radicalized as the country does. The poetic lyricism of the first section is mostly abandoned to make room for the politics, which are no doubt admirable but a little trenchant-- the narrator is left-socialist, but that's a hard story to tell from this distance, because it doesn't turn out well-- the last chapter is about the crackdown, about the torture of artists and students and police leaving bloody footprints, and you really can't come back from that, nor do things get any better, really. It's just a slog.
I believe in the portrait, btw; It feels very real, and it's a chapter of history, greater Europe's reaction to the student movements of the sixties and seventies that I feel more and more like I don't understand, and I'm always interested. But it really does feel like a totally different book than the one I read under the same cover. And it's a book that I don't think I like quite as much.
So, a good book, but one that works a bit at cross-purposes, at least to me, and one in which the political commitments are no doubt sincere, but left unresolved by the book's conclusion.