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War and peace in a small Anatolian town

Reviewed by Charles Solomon

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Birds Without Wings

By Louis De Bernières

KNOPF; 553 PAGES; $29.95
“Birds Without Wings” is Louis De Bernières’ first novel since “Corelli’s
Mandolin” (1994), which won the Granta Prize, sold 2.5 million copies
worldwide and became a big-budget Hollywood film with Penelope Cruz and
Nicolas Cage. Even the author acknowledges that his new novel may not
duplicate the success of the previous one. “Birds” is a long, interesting
and sometimes challenging book. An account of the changes the first third of
the 20th century brings to a small Turkish village may not appeal to a mass
audience, particularly without an overriding romance to leaven the tale.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Eskibahçe is a town of no distinction in
western Anatolia. Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Armenians live there in
relative peace under the policy of tolerance that represented the Ottoman
Empire at its best. In Eskibahçe, a Christian father veils his young
daughter at the request of the learned imam, who finds that her beauty is
distracting the local men; a Muslim housewife asks her Christian neighbor to
light a candle before the icon of the Virgin — just in case. The scandals,
triumphs, solutions and problems remain local matters that the local people
can handle, just as their parents and grandparents did.

Then what Iskander the Potter calls the “great world” intervenes,
precipitating decades of wrenching sorrow and bloodshed. The Armenian
genocide is followed by World War I, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and
the emergence of modern Turkey. The end of the war produces the forced
expulsion and resettlement of half a million ethnic Greek Christians to
Greece (and of 1 million ethnic Turks to Turkey), a socially and
economically disastrous policy dictated by the Lausanne Settlement.

De Bernières presents the suffering of the inhabitants of Eskibahçe in
counterpoint to the life of Kemal Ataturk, commenting that history “is
finally nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from hacked flesh in the
name of great ideas.” De Bernières writes dense, fine-grained prose that
moves with the measured grace of a 19th century novel. But he often seems to
have spent too much time with the thesaurus and to have picked up a little
too much local color. If there’s an obscure, multi-syllable adjective that
can replace a simple, familiar one, he invariably chooses the former. He
delights in including words and phrases in Turkish and Greek, but rarely
bothers to translate them. When a grotesque, eccentric beggar takes up
residence among the nearby ancient tombs, the people of Eskibahçe provide
alms in the form of food: “They arrived with their small but honourable
offerings of kadinbudu köfte, green beans in olive oil and iç pilàv, and
then departed, having greeted him with a quiet ‘Hos geldiniz.’ ”

In an interview with the Observer, De Bernières said, “I’m one of those
writers who’s always going to be trying to write ‘War and Peace’: failing,
obviously, but trying.” A more apt comparison would be Dickens. De
Bernières’ narrative doesn’t proceed with the irresistible, martial sweep of
“War and Peace”; events seem like the product of chance and myriad small
decisions made by individuals, rather than historical inevitability. There’s
a Dickensian tone to De Bernières’ accounts of the everyday experiences of
his numerous characters, including minor, eccentric ones. It’s easy to
imagine Pip encountering Daskalos Leonidas, the embittered teacher who
spends his days teaching Greek to students he disdains and his nights
writing subversive political tracts that everyone ignores.

“Birds Without Wings” also lacks the passion that marks the novels of
Tolstoy (and Dickens, for that matter). Although Iskander’s son Karatavuk
takes part in it as a sniper, De Bernières fails to convey the horrors of
Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, where 281,000 Allied troops and 250,000 Turks
perished. The intimate domestic vignettes come to life in a way that the big
set pieces don’t. When two village housewives help each other during hard
times, blithely ignoring the religious and ethnic differences that will
later tear their lives apart, the reader can almost smell the onions and
olives in their kitchens. Karatavuk describes the stench and filth of the
battlefield in endless detail, but the images don’t register with the same
force. The catalog of tortures inflicted on the civilian populace by various
armies and brigands has less impact than the list of dishes at the feast
that Rustem Bey’s new mistress prepares for him.

Ultimately, “Birds Without Wings” is an ambitious book in which the little
things are what come to life. –

Charles Solomon is a Los Angeles writer.