by JCM | 15 Sep, 2016 | Narratives & Meanings
4/5 stars
Rather liked this. Told from multiple perspectives (including those of animals, dead people, and abstract concepts), it’s a rare historical murder mystery that didn’t violently irritate me by being an historical novel that’s a murder mystery, one of the most frustrating clichés of the historical fiction genre.
Underlying it all is a melancholy exploration of the Islamic rejection of art, and the Turkish identity crisis that’s continuing to this day, making this a wonderfully contemporary book, even while being set five centuries ago. Reads well too – a solid translation.
Four stars primarily because it’s deliberately written in a way that makes it hard to keep track of some of the characters’ identities, which may well help maintain the murder mystery, but occasionally makes for a confusing reading experience.
by JCM | 3 Sep, 2016 | Structures & Models
5/5 stars
“events! if you want those, you’d best stop reading now)”
Extremely readable – finished in one sitting – and a perfect piece of postmodern contemporary anthropology of a particular kind of existence in c.2012-2015 London that felt all kinds of familiar. I can see how some would find it pretentious, but it felt so much like a more accessible, less thesaurus-prone mid-90s Will Self that I couldn’t help but like it lots.
Two passages in particular sum up the book, for me:
“It will find its shape, he’d said; I leave all that to you… What if, rather than *it* finding its shape, the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channelled incarnations, were to find and mould *it*? What if the age, the era, were to do this from so close up, and with such immediacy and force, thay the *it* would all but vanish, leaving just world-shape, era-mould? I started thinking thoughts like this… Beneath their vagueness, I felt something forming”
And:
“Certainly, the fact it came from me, and the context within which it was presented, would imbue it for him with all kinds of cryptic meaning. And besides, I felt with real conviction that it *was* full of this already: meaning of a genuinely deep and intense nature, whose sense eluded me but whose presence radiated, pouring into everything around it.”
Yes, I can see how some would find it pretentious, pointless. Because it is. But knowingly so. Which is, as far as I can tell, the entire postmodernist point – and one that I greatly enjoyed.
