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A review by ajkhn
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières
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.
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.