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A review by alundeberg
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières
5.0
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.
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.