littlecake 's review for:

L'Architecte du sultan by Elif Shafak

DID NOT FINISH: 27%

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I picked up The Architect’s Apprentice hoping for a slow, atmospheric historical novel — the kind where you can really sink into the social and political fabric of the time. For me, the point of reading a slower historical book is that the details and context should feel accurate enough to analyse, almost like a time capsule.

Unfortunately, two major historical liberties broke that immersion for me:

• The execution of a “mad” Sufi sheikh in Istanbul — This scene reads almost identically to the famous execution of al-Hallāj in 10th‑century Baghdad, but transplanted wholesale into 16th‑century Istanbul. While tensions between orthodox scholars and certain Sufis did exist in the Ottoman capital, there’s no record of such a public execution for mystical statements in Suleiman’s time. The relocation of this event felt not just fictionalised but historically misleading.

• Plague riots targeting Christians, Jews, and Sufis — The novel describes an outbreak of plague in Istanbul where Christians are accused of bringing it in through pork, Jewish neighbourhoods are attacked, and Sufis are accused of “not being Muslim.” While the empire had occasional interreligious tensions, I couldn’t find any historical basis for such riots in Suleiman’s reign. If anything, the period was marked by protection of minority communities in the capital.

Both moments are dramatic on the page — but if you read historical fiction to understand the nuances of a period, they undercut that purpose. Without trust in the accuracy of the social and political backdrop, the contemplative pacing stopped feeling rewarding. If I already can’t trust the historical research 180 pages in, I don’t see how I could keep going for another 600.

To avoid any FOMO, I looked up the rest of the plot — and apparently there are equally inaccurate and romanticised trips to Persia and Europe later on, most likely there to comment on contemporary politics in the same way she does in other parts of the book. Personally, that just put me off even more.

On a more personal note, I was initially thrilled to see an Indian protagonist — as an Indian myself, I loved the idea of a character crossing into the Ottoman world, since such exchanges and journeys did happen at the time. But the only Urdu sentence I’ve encountered so far has mistakes, and Jahan never actually brings an outsider’s gaze to Istanbul. There’s no curiosity about the city as a newcomer, no comparison between Islam in India and in the Ottoman Empire — which could have been fascinating. He often felt less like a Mughal‑era Indian traveller and more like a misplaced British wanderer.

And until where I’ve read, the female characters are disappointingly caricatured and slightly exoticised — which feels like a missed opportunity from an author who presents herself as feminist.

Shafak’s prose is vivid and her Istanbul is sensory and full of life, but ultimately, this felt less like a faithful Ottoman portrait and more like a modern, Western‑framed fable set in an Ottoman‑themed stage. I bowed out at 187 pages — life’s too short to push through a book that’s making you grumble at the history instead of enjoying the story.