A review by arirang
Like a Sword Wound, by Ahmet Altan
3.0
They were talking to him: telling him about cities, palaces, mansions, tekkes, wars, conflicts, murders, loves, jealousies, angers, betrayals, friendships, the human condition, and there stories always began on that strange day Sheikh Efendi’s wedding was held.
Translated from the 1997 original Kılıç Yarası Gibi by Ahmet Altan, Like a Sword Wound is the first volume in English of a planned quartet of novels, historical sagas, three of which have been published in the original Turkish, documenting the end days of the Ottoman Empire.
As the author explains in a Publishers Weekly interview (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/77909-from-prison-ahmet-altan-confronts-turkey-s-dark-history.html):
“I planned this as a tetralogy to show the cultural diversification and inner conflicts within a family as the years passed, while at the same time telling the story of the step-by-step collapse of an empire.”
The article goes on to explain that Sandro Ferri of Edizioni E/O in Italy and the English-language Europa Editions (publishers also of Elena Ferrante) is bringing out the Ottoman Quartet in Italian and English: Love in the Days of Rebellion will follow in fall 2019. The third novel, Dying is Easier than Loving, is not yet scheduled, and Altan is working on the untitled final volume in Silivri Prison outside Istanbul ... His website unabashedly states that the final volume of the Ottoman Quartet is set in 1915 and “tells the tales of the Battle of Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.”
Note the reference to prison - Altan is serving a life sentence, "part of a wave of arrests of thinkers and writers following the failed coup of July 15, 2016" (per Pen https://pen.org/advocacy-case/ahmet-mehmet-altan/)
The above background, while important, makes this sound like a deeply political and hence likely dull novel, but that is not the case at all
This first volume covers the latter years of the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, around the turn of the 20th century and up to the time of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
It is told via a rich cast of related characters, including the Sultan's personal physician, the leader of a prominent tekke (Dervish monastery), an Ottoman princess (the physician's former wife) and some young officers in the armed forces.
The traditional omniscient third person narrator is given a small modern twist by having the narrator be the great-grandson of the Dervish Sheikh, telling the story from the modern day, based on what he learns from the ghosts of the various characters who visit him in his run-down property.
The history of this city, of this room, of these things, has been altered by each narrator, each time it has come to possess a different story, a different season, a different age, and each time it has lost its history and sunk further into oblivion.
The author explains in the PW interview:
“I think we can call this type of narrative ‘neo-classical,’” Altan muses. “Here the classical narrative, with people and their emotions at its center, is enriched by the more flexible and playful narrative techniques of modernism. It basically means telling the story of a person and his destiny by using all the devices that are available to literature.”
although it has to be said the device is used sparingly, indeed it seems something of a veneer to a rather more conventional historical novel.
The novel contains a nod to Proust, although closer to a 19th century Dickensian tale, when one character returns from liberal Paris to repressed Istanbul and tells her son about a new literary sensation:
There is a new novelist who’s becoming popular ... Gide didn’t like his manuscript, and told the publisher not to print it. But they went ahead, and it was very successful, and now Gide is in disgrace, he didn’t leave his house for a month.
albeit I think this is one historical inaccuracy in what is otherwise a carefully researched novel. The conversation takes place before the 1903 Salonica bombings, but Gide's initial rejection of Proust's A La Recherche took place in 1912.
The tale told in the novel itself paints a rich picture of life in the Ottoman Empire and of turn-of-the-century Istanbul, albeit there a little too much reliance on some rather cliched stunningly beautiful and sexually promiscuous women.
I found it more fulfilling when the characters became more enmeshed in the political developments of the time. In particular, the novel shows effectively how the Sultan was obsessed with the risk of being deposed in favour of his brother, and spent his energy and resources on playing off the various Pashas against one another so as to divide and rule, but was completely blindsided by the nascent threat from the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks, one that to ultimately lead to a successful revolution and the seizure of effective power.
Altan, with an eye to the present day, also shows how, despite their apparent liberal tendencies, most of the revolutionaries were blind to the needs of the ethnic minorities in the Empire.
And the novel ends on a doubly poignant note. One of the key male characters, unhappy in his marriage, shoots himself and another settles down only to realise He had a house, he had a wife, and he knew he would be unhappy forever.
And in an atypical intervention in the story itself, and with a nod to the present day (one even more poignant given recent developments in Turkey post the original publication of the novel) Osman observes that:
It occurred to him that these people celebrating the end of tyranny, these people who had journeyed to the land of the dead so long ago, didn’t know that tyranny never ended in this land, that one tyranny had ended only for another to begin, that nothing other than tyranny could grow on this land.
3.5 stars - politically illuminating but not entirely successful in literary terms. The key test is whether I will read volumes 2 and further when published - and currently the jury is out on that.
Translated from the 1997 original Kılıç Yarası Gibi by Ahmet Altan, Like a Sword Wound is the first volume in English of a planned quartet of novels, historical sagas, three of which have been published in the original Turkish, documenting the end days of the Ottoman Empire.
As the author explains in a Publishers Weekly interview (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/77909-from-prison-ahmet-altan-confronts-turkey-s-dark-history.html):
“I planned this as a tetralogy to show the cultural diversification and inner conflicts within a family as the years passed, while at the same time telling the story of the step-by-step collapse of an empire.”
The article goes on to explain that Sandro Ferri of Edizioni E/O in Italy and the English-language Europa Editions (publishers also of Elena Ferrante) is bringing out the Ottoman Quartet in Italian and English: Love in the Days of Rebellion will follow in fall 2019. The third novel, Dying is Easier than Loving, is not yet scheduled, and Altan is working on the untitled final volume in Silivri Prison outside Istanbul ... His website unabashedly states that the final volume of the Ottoman Quartet is set in 1915 and “tells the tales of the Battle of Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.”
Note the reference to prison - Altan is serving a life sentence, "part of a wave of arrests of thinkers and writers following the failed coup of July 15, 2016" (per Pen https://pen.org/advocacy-case/ahmet-mehmet-altan/)
The above background, while important, makes this sound like a deeply political and hence likely dull novel, but that is not the case at all
This first volume covers the latter years of the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, around the turn of the 20th century and up to the time of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
It is told via a rich cast of related characters, including the Sultan's personal physician, the leader of a prominent tekke (Dervish monastery), an Ottoman princess (the physician's former wife) and some young officers in the armed forces.
The traditional omniscient third person narrator is given a small modern twist by having the narrator be the great-grandson of the Dervish Sheikh, telling the story from the modern day, based on what he learns from the ghosts of the various characters who visit him in his run-down property.
The history of this city, of this room, of these things, has been altered by each narrator, each time it has come to possess a different story, a different season, a different age, and each time it has lost its history and sunk further into oblivion.
The author explains in the PW interview:
“I think we can call this type of narrative ‘neo-classical,’” Altan muses. “Here the classical narrative, with people and their emotions at its center, is enriched by the more flexible and playful narrative techniques of modernism. It basically means telling the story of a person and his destiny by using all the devices that are available to literature.”
although it has to be said the device is used sparingly, indeed it seems something of a veneer to a rather more conventional historical novel.
The novel contains a nod to Proust, although closer to a 19th century Dickensian tale, when one character returns from liberal Paris to repressed Istanbul and tells her son about a new literary sensation:
There is a new novelist who’s becoming popular ... Gide didn’t like his manuscript, and told the publisher not to print it. But they went ahead, and it was very successful, and now Gide is in disgrace, he didn’t leave his house for a month.
albeit I think this is one historical inaccuracy in what is otherwise a carefully researched novel. The conversation takes place before the 1903 Salonica bombings, but Gide's initial rejection of Proust's A La Recherche took place in 1912.
The tale told in the novel itself paints a rich picture of life in the Ottoman Empire and of turn-of-the-century Istanbul, albeit there a little too much reliance on some rather cliched stunningly beautiful and sexually promiscuous women.
I found it more fulfilling when the characters became more enmeshed in the political developments of the time. In particular, the novel shows effectively how the Sultan was obsessed with the risk of being deposed in favour of his brother, and spent his energy and resources on playing off the various Pashas against one another so as to divide and rule, but was completely blindsided by the nascent threat from the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks, one that to ultimately lead to a successful revolution and the seizure of effective power.
Altan, with an eye to the present day, also shows how, despite their apparent liberal tendencies, most of the revolutionaries were blind to the needs of the ethnic minorities in the Empire.
And the novel ends on a doubly poignant note. One of the key male characters, unhappy in his marriage, shoots himself and another settles down only to realise He had a house, he had a wife, and he knew he would be unhappy forever.
And in an atypical intervention in the story itself, and with a nod to the present day (one even more poignant given recent developments in Turkey post the original publication of the novel) Osman observes that:
It occurred to him that these people celebrating the end of tyranny, these people who had journeyed to the land of the dead so long ago, didn’t know that tyranny never ended in this land, that one tyranny had ended only for another to begin, that nothing other than tyranny could grow on this land.
3.5 stars - politically illuminating but not entirely successful in literary terms. The key test is whether I will read volumes 2 and further when published - and currently the jury is out on that.