Good Fiction

 Elif Shafak

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak relates a tale of several rivers and the people who are fascinated by these rivers. Throughout the novel, one metaphor comes up over and over: that a drop of water has a memory that can connect these disparate individuals just as their personal fascination with rivers connects them. We hear a lot about their experiences with the rivers of London in the 19th and 20th centuries; the rivers of ancient and modern Mesopotamia; and also a bit about the rivers of Paris and the bodies of water around Istanbul. Metaphorically their experiences are reflected in a single drop of water that lasts through the ages. 

I was especially interested in the author’s use of the water-drop metaphor, because it’s based on a completely discredited scientific theory, specifically that of  “the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste, who developed the theory of ‘water memory’ at the cost of his career and professional reputation.” (p. 475)  What fascinates me is that a scientific disaster like this one can make a good literary device! Other novelists,  poets, dancers, musicians, and narrative writers, have also used this bad science as a good artistic metaphor.

The Lamassus

Each of the characters in the novel has a relationship with the ancient mythical hybrid creatures called Lamassus. 

The author explains:

“Lamassus are protective spirits. Hewn from a single slab of limestone, such sculptures have the head of a man, the wings of an eagle and the hulking body of a bull or a lion. Endowed with the best qualities of each of their three species, they represent anthropoid intelligence, avian insight, and taurine or leonine strength. They are the guardians of gateways that open on to other realms.” (p. 7) 

 

Ancient Times: King Ashurbanipal 

Ashurbanipal was the king of the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. He collected clay and stone tablets on which were written both mundane records of crops and accountancy and also tablets with verses from the epic poem Gilgamesh. Eventually, archaeologists were fascinated with finding these tablets and reconstructing this ancient poem. Here is an image from that era showing Ashurbanipal and his wife:

“Ashurbanipal and his wife are drinking wine and enjoying a picnic in an idyllic garden, whilst from the boughs of a tree nearby, amidst ripe fruits, dangles the decapitated head of their enemy, the Elamite king Teumman.” (p. 7)

 

Born in 1840: “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” — From the Thames to the Tigris River

Brought up in the most desperate poverty, the fancifully named “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” was a young man with some very unusual gifts of memory and recognition of patterns. Although without formal education, he grasps the meaning of the writing on the clay tablets — once owned by Ashurbanipal, now in the British museum — and becomes a scholar, eventually traveling to the site beside the Tigris River where he hopes to find some of the missing verses of Gilgamesh. Here are his thoughts as he approaches the site where he hopes to search for the clay tablets:

“If he closes his eyes he can imagine an utterly different view from thousands of years back and see his surroundings as if looking through cut glass: gardens lush as paradise, palms and grape vines, edible and ornamental plants; pine, olive, juniper, cypress, pomegranate and fig trees all around. Parrots gliding about among the branches, while tame lions roam below. Fruit of all kinds, luxurious orchards and, spreading far out into the distance, grain fields on four sides. All of it possible because thousands of slaves, their bodies tattooed with the identification marks of their owners, labored with pickaxes carving channels to bring water into this barren landscape, diverting the river from the mountains all the way into Nineveh. They were here, the kings and the canal builders. It all happened here—the ambitious dream of King Sennacherib, continued and expanded by his grandson King Ashurbanipal.” (p. 312)

 

Born in 2005: Narin in Turkey and Iraq

Member of a long-persecuted Christian minority in Turkey and Iraq, the child Narin seemed doomed throughout the chapters that described her life. The events she experienced took place in 2014, both in Turkey and later in the same area where King Ashurbanipal once reigned and where Arthur conducted his search for the missing verses of Gilgamesh. At age nine, she wants to know why her people are reviled, but her grandmother instead offers her food:

“Sensing her disappointment, Grandma opens another bag. Inside, wrapped in a cloth to keep them warm, are flatbreads—each spread with sheep’s milk butter and filled with herbed cheese. The old woman makes these every morning at the crack of dawn, settled on a stool in the courtyard. She pats the dough into round pieces, slaps them against the tandoor and bakes them until they are crisp and puffy. She knows how much the girl loves them.” (p. 42)

Born in the 1980s: Zaleekhah in London

Zaleekhah Clarke is a scientist who studies rivers. In 2018 her life is in flux as she has just moved out of  the apartment she shares with her husband, and moved to a houseboat docked in the Thames, another significant river. Her relationship with her uncle, who comes from an unspecified part of “The Levant” includes her views of many rivers in both London and the Middle East. Here is just one example of the water drop that remembers — a tear that she sheds as she first sees her new home, the houseboat:

“A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallized salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometers away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapor and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and relocated. Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.” (p. 77)

 

So Many Interesting Stories

My introductions to these major characters are very brief and I haven’t really showed you how interesting they are, maybe just that they are quite intriguing. It’s difficult to capture what really appeals to me in this novel, which is so different from the others I’ve read by Elif Shafak.

I’ll end my very selective and digressive review by quoting the passage about the water drop from the beginning of the novel:

“Dangling from the edge of the storm cloud is a single drop of rain—no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously—small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth below opening like a lonely lotus flower. Not that this will be the first time: it has made the journey before—ascending to the sky, descending to terra firma and rising heavenwards again—and yet it still finds the fall terrifying. 

“Remember that drop, inconsequential though it may be compared with the magnitude of the universe. Inside its miniature orb, it holds the secret of infinity, a story uniquely its own. When it finally musters the courage, it leaps into the ether. It is falling now—fast, faster. Gravity always helps. From a height of 3,080 feet it races down. Only three minutes until it reaches the ground.” (p. 4)

Review  © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Another tale of the Promised Land

‘Although I wrote Kantika as a novel, I played with the line between fact and fiction and drew on the experiences of some real people, most centrally my maternal grandmother, Rebecca (née Cohen) Baruch Levy (1902–1991).” (From the author’s Acknowledgements, Kantika, p.283)

Kantika by Elizabeth Graver is a story of a family with deep roots in one place: Turkey. After the first World War, Turkey experienced major changes in government and policy. The long-enduring Sultanate was overthrown by nationalists, and thus minority communities were abused, persecuted, and expelled or driven to flee. The most extreme victims of this extremist nationalism were the Armenians: between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1916 in what is now viewed as the first genocide of the twentieth century. 

A historic Jewish community in Turkey also suffered from the emerging policy. Kantika is the story of just one family from this community, told through the experiences of Rebecca, the author’s grandmother. Rebecca’s parents belonged to the Sephardic-Iberian Jewish community that had lived in the Ottoman Empire since their ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492. They proudly identified as Turkish Jews and as long-term residents of Istanbul. Her father’s thoughts: “This city, the ground beneath his feet, here where he was born and his parents are buried—is his homeland.” (p. 39)

Rebecca’s father had a factory, and the family were well-off, able to pay for their children’s education (and not to rely on charity schools). They had a solid and respected position in the community, and a fairly luxurious house. Because the novel is presented from Rebecca’s point of view as a child and very young woman, there’s not an excess of historic or socio-political detail. Just this: her father loses his factory, and sees that he can no longer make a living under the increasingly hostile new regime. He can find nowhere to take the family except Barcelona, Spain, where there’s a very small Jewish community to which they can move. Somehow, her father was unable to find a way to go to much more promising places that other members of the community were managing to emigrate to: specifically, to Cuba or New York. 

Kantika follows Rebecca as she adapts to life in Barcelona, learns to make a living as a dressmaker, and marries an unreliable man who abandons her and her children. Her struggles and her optimism are fascinating to read: it’s not the broad events of history and politics that make this book relatable — it’s the way she deals with her circumstances. The way she realizes that she must conceal her Jewish identity. The way she deals with many setbacks. Spain in the 1920s was becoming a less and less safe place, so she agrees to an arranged marriage with a man from their original community in Turkey who has successfully immigrated to New York and become a citizen. 

Thus, by the mid-1930s, Rebecca is living in New York. Her story continues as she adapts to living in the US, managing to bring her two sons from Spain, and having three more children, besides the child of her husband and his first, deceased wife. One of the final chapters vividly describes her son's experiences in combat in the Pacific during World War II.

A fairly typical immigrant story? Yes, but it’s not the story, it’s how you tell it. The characters and events in Rebecca’s story, and above all, Rebecca herself, are in one way undistinguished, ordinary, and quite similar to many others in stories of how we American descendants of immigrants all got to where we are. But the telling: that’s special. The author loves these people — all her own relatives and their peers. And reading this, one gets to love them too. 

review © 2024 mae sander

Recent Reading

 

While traveling earlier this month, and since I returned, I read three highly enjoyable mystery stories. During this time, I was busy documenting my experiences, so I did not write reviews of these books although I liked them very much. Here is a very brief summary of my impressions.

• Kiego Higashino, The Final Curtain (published December, 2023) — a very long book that ties up the details of the life of Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga. The plot is very very involved and the number of characters and subplots is huge, but I still found it readable. 
• Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, The Gutenberg Murders (published 1931) — set in New Orleans, this is very much a mystery in the classic who-done-it tradition of Hammett and Chandler. Other than the fact that all the characters smoke cigarettes nonstop, it could just about be modern.
• Jason Goodwin, The Baklava Club (published 2014) — this series features the mystery-solving Yashim, who works for the Ottoman Emperor in Istanbul in the mid-19th century. While I very much like the well-researched details of Yashim’s life, especially when he shops in the market and cooks for his friends, I also appreciate the increasing suspense around the murder he had to solve in this, the final volume of the series so far. Goodwin’s characters are always very intriguing.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Chinese Restaurants Everywhere

 

Chinese restaurants serve more or less adapted meals to people in amazing places throughout the world. In a recently published book titled Have You Eaten Yet? Cheuk Kwan, an author and TV presenter, described quite a few of them. Kwan’s memoir describes his journey to many out-of-the-way places in the course of making a documentary series on Chinese food for Canadian television. I’ve found that the original TV shows are available on Youtube; I will watch some soon, I hope. 

Although the travel and research for the TV series that forms the basis for the book took place 20 years ago, this memoir was written in 2021 and just published in Canada in 2022 and in the US in 2023. I really don’t understand why it took around two decades for the author to write a book based on such old information: it seems to have no recent observations or experiences in it, which makes it a bit disappointing and frustrating to read. So much must have happened since then!

Where are the Chinese Restaurants?

Havana, Cuba; Tamatave, Madagascar; Istanbul, Turkey; Darjeeling, India; São Paulo and Manaus, Brazil, inside the Arctic circle in Tromsø, Norway; Haifa, Israel; and a number of other locations — each place Kwan visited had distinctive Chinese restaurants whose owners shared their fascinating personal and family histories, sometimes for several generations. 

“Have you eaten yet” is the way Chinese people often say “How are you?” — perhaps reflecting a past where food wasn’t abundant, and perhaps just reflecting the shared value of a well-prepared meal. Despite the enormous and varied population of China and the unimaginable extent and long history of the Chinese diaspora, Kwan makes us see how many characteristics remain in common throughout this very large part of the human race. He also makes clear that although his focus is on restaurant people, there are many many other Chinese professionals throughout the world as well.

The book is full of fascinating details about the restaurant owners and workers, and about the many ways they have invented Chinese food to please customers wherever their restaurants may be. While the adaptations are fascinating, I was also interested in the numerous times that the author says the food is fully authentic and equal in quality to that in the most renowned restaurants in Hong Kong. Although the author clearly knows that there are many cuisines practiced by the billion people in China, and many adaptations and inventions of Chinese food in restaurants worldwide, he does a good job of showing its unity in the many restaurants he visited and the many people he interviewed. 

So much to learn! I was fascinated by the many places (on several continents and islands) where Chinese chefs specialized in fish from the local waters, creating traditional Chinese fish dishes with local spices. I had no idea that a Chinese community had lived in Cuba since 1857. I learned that China had a very long cultural influence on the east coast of Africa, with trade routes for Chinese ships established around the first century BCE, and a visit from a fleet in around 1418. I was interested to hear about fusion dishes combining Chinese and Indian food, Chinese and Peruvian food, and a few others. But as I say, I wish there had been some updates for the last 20 years, especially about the major changes that have occurred recently in Hong Kong, the author’s reference city for the best of Chinese cuisine.

And Here at Home —

Of course reading this book made me want Chinese food from our currently-favorite local restaurant, Bao Space, which opened earlier this year. Bao, a type of delicious filled and steamed buns, are the star of their menu. The owners, Jessie Zhu, the main chef, and her husband, Raphael Zhu, came to Ann Arbor from Shanghai. Their roots are in Northern China, where they say bao originally came from. 

I’ve posted about Bao Space a few times, but here’s a bit more…

 This is the Bao Space kitchen, which is visible from the window where orders are placed.

Dough for the bao buns is freshly made with flour, yeast, and milk.

Our order: bao buns, sesame-noodle-cucumber salad, and two cups of lemonade.
The menu is simple: just bao, dumplings, a few soups & noodle bowls, and soft drinks.

One bao filled with pork. Other fillings include chicken, beef, and several vegetarian options.

Review and photos © 2023 mae sander

Shared with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

“The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury”

Marc Levy is a best-selling French novelist. This is the first of his books that I have read. I was disappointed for the same reason that very popular historical fiction often disappoints me: it does too good a job of meeting my expectations. As a result, books like this don't seem to offer any new insights about its historic time and place, and often portray their characters with 21st century social and cultural attitudes.  

The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury begins in London  in 1950, just after the war. Most readers would have some expectations about this setting: the neighborhoods that are not yet restored after the severe bombings, the lives that are affected by loss of loved-ones, the shortages and rationing of food and clothing that are still in effect, and the feeling among Londoners that the rest of the world is healing more quickly. These are cliches. And the author relies far too much on these cliches: it’s too predictable. Amidst these conditions, Alice Pendelbury, the main character, lives in a studio apartment all alone. She has a few friends and no family: they died in the bombing. 

On page 15, a fortune-teller discerns a very unexpected future for Alice. Because of her visceral reaction to the fortune-teller’s prediction, Alice soon afterwards travels to Istanbul with her next-door neighbor. The rest of the novel is a quest to discover the truth of the prediction. It’s a long quest, which many readers probably find quite suspenseful and enjoyable, but again, I found it a bit too full of cliches. (I’ll forgo presenting plot details since you might want to read it and find out for yourself.)

All in all, I found Alice’s story to be a kind of over-the-top melodrama. The descriptions of Istanbul seemed mostly the sort of thing that you could find in a 1950s guidebook. Alice’s air travel from London to Istanbul was presented with all the expected details from the early days of commercial plane travel. On arrival, Alice and her travel companion checked into the Pera Palace Hotel — which was the major high-end place for famous European visitors from early in the twentieth century until the end of World War II. By 1950 when the novel takes place it was actually a bit run down because of political choices made by the Turkish government (its Greek owners were expelled and it was given to a native/Moslem Turk), but the decline doesn’t seem have happened in the book. And on and on.

There were also some questionable details — small ones but they bothered me. For example, Alice’s traveling companion brings her a beautiful evening gown to wear to an event at the British Embassy. She says it’s lovely and he says:  

“It’s a French model called the ‘New Look.’ They might not be much at the art of war, but I have to admit that the French have an undeniable genius for dressing women ... .”  

Remember, the novel is set in the year 1950. Dior’s “New Look” debuted in Paris in 1947 and was a sensation, noted throughout the world. To show you how famous this was: the term “New Look” was coined by Life magazine. So the characters’ unfamiliarity with the style by 1950 is a bit off. This is a detail, but the kind of detail that disrupts my trust in a a historical novel.

Alice Pendelbury’s distinguishing feature was her acute sense of smell:

“Alice had a rare gift: she was a ‘nose.’ Her sense of smell was so acute that she could distinguish and memorize the slightest odor. She spent her days alone, bent over the long wooden table in her flat, blending different essences to obtain combinations that might one day become a perfume. Every month she made the rounds of the London perfume shops, offering them her new creations.” (p. 6)

Throughout the book Alice is highly aware of aromas and the way they trigger her memories. She seeks out unusual combinations of fragrance that create a characteristic ambience, and she designs perfumes and other aromatic products. Normally, I would find this a very compelling theme in a novel. Unfortunately, I thought that like many things here, the depiction of smells and the memories they elicited was presented in a formulaic and mechanical way. Again, I found this a source of disappointment.

Similarly, the descriptions of food in this novel seem done by rote. The scarce groceries in London, the cups of coffee, the Turkish breakfasts, and the fine restaurants were all described in a way that I found too predictable, too superficial, and  too close to what I’ve read in many other accounts of travel. I was also a little skeptical about the accuracy: for example, eggs, meat, and bacon were rationed until 1954, but the characters seem to find at least some of them in the shops. Maybe they had ration cards or something for the small quantities they bought; this wasn’t mentioned and again is only a detail.

I’m sure my reactions to this novel are eccentric: many readers obviously find this author very compelling. Sorry to be a malcontent. This book was one of 10 free books offered on Kindle this month. The author was on my “maybe read” list so I went for it. I hope I more throughly enjoy the others I chose.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Another Istanbul Novel by Elif Shafak

"Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong. Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive." 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Kindle Locations 3100-3103). 

Aromas and flavors are the essence of memory. In this unusual novel, each segment of the narrator's reveries begins with a smell or taste memory. One strange thing among the many strange things in the novel, is that the narrator, named Leila, has just died, and her brain has only this brief time remaining of its lifetime of consciousness. The reader learns this at the very beginning:

"No, she would insist on the present tense – even though she now realized with a sinking feeling that her heart had just stopped beating, and her breathing had abruptly ceased, and whichever way she looked at her situation there was no denying that she was dead." (Kindle Locations 71-73). 

Elif Shafak's novels, which I have enjoyed, always use aromas, flavors, and food descriptions in an original way, and this is no exception. Rather than summarize more about the plot and the very colorful characters who populate the book, I'll just quote a few of the food and aroma descriptions:

"Two minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila’s mind recalled two contrasting tastes: lemon and sugar." (Kindle Locations 487-488).

"Three minutes had passed since Leila’s heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee – strong, intense, dark. A taste forever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul. ... The area around the port was always so crowded that pedestrians had to move sideways like crabs. Young women in miniskirts walked arm in arm; drivers catcalled out of car windows; apprentices from coffeehouses scurried back and forth, carrying tea trays loaded with small glasses; tourists bent under the weight of their backpacks gazed around as if newly awake; shoe-shine boys rattled their brushes against their brass boxes, decorated with photos of actresses – modest ones on the front, nudes on the back. Vendors peeled salted cucumbers, squeezed fresh pickle juice, roasted chickpeas and yelled over one another while motorists blasted their horns for no reason at all. Smells of tobacco, sweat, perfume, fried food and an occasional reefer – albeit illegal – mingled with the briny sea air." (Kindle Locations 724-726). 

"Five minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila recalled her brother’s birth. A memory that carried with it the taste and smell of spiced goat stew – cumin, fennel seeds, cloves, onions, tomatoes, tail fat and goat’s meat." (Kindle Locations 1192-1193).

"In the ninth minute, Leila’s memory simultaneously slowed down and spun out of control as fragments of her past whirled inside her head in an ecstatic dance, like passing bees. She now remembered D/ Ali, and the thought of him brought along the taste of chocolate bonbons with surprise fillings inside – caramel, cherry paste, hazelnut praline." (Kindle Locations 2079-2081). 

"As time ticked away, Leila’s mind happily recollected the taste of her favourite street food: deep-fried mussels – flour, egg yolks, bicarbonate of soda, pepper, salt, and mussels fresh from the Black Sea." (Kindle Locations 2302-2304) 

"He wanted to know other things about her – what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give every city a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul? If ‘freedom’ were a type of food, he wondered, how did she think she would experience it on the tongue? And how about ‘fatherland’? D/ Ali seemed to perceive the world through flavours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells." (Kindle Locations 2228-2233).

"The last thing Leila remembered was the taste of home-made strawberry cake. ... On what was to be her last birthday, her friends had settled on a rich menu: lamb stew with aubergine puree, börek with spinach and feta cheese, kidney beans with spicy pastrami, stuffed green peppers and a little jar of fresh caviar. The cake was a surprise, supposedly, but Leila had overheard them discussing it; the walls in the flat were thinner than the slices of pastrami, and, after decades of heavy smoking and even heavier drinking, Nalan rasped when she whispered, her voice husky like sandpaper scraping on metal. Strawberry cream with fluffy, fairy-tale-pink icing." (Kindle Locations 2815-2835). 

In my opinion, Shafak is one of the most skillful novelists weaving the senses of smell and taste into works of fiction. I very much recommend her books to anyone who loves this type writing.

This blog post is copyright © 2019 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Byzantine Murals

Some of the world's most beautiful murals, I believe, were made by mosaic artists and fresco painters working throughout the Byzantine Empire. Many extraordinary churches were built and decorated in a unique Byzantine style from the early days of Roman Byzantium through the Middle Ages. I'm especially fond of this artwork, and I've made efforts to visit cities where these churches are located in order to enjoy seeing this artwork. I did try to take pictures of the murals which are very large and not always well-lighted, so my photos of the murals are not fantastic. Thus, I've selected some available images, mainly from Wikipedia, to illustrate these historic and wonderful murals. I searched for images of the mosaics that I recall most vividly: I've chosen only one for each city that I've visited. If you are intrigued, you can easily find more.

Palermo, Sicily

King Roger II of Sicily being crowned by Christ. (Wikipedia)
Several churches in Palermo have remarkable murals by Byzantine artists
that were hired by the Norman kings of Sicily in the eleventh century.

Monreale, Sicily

Interior of Monreale Cathedral. Monreale is near Palermo. (Wikipedia)

Ravenna, Italy

The Emperor Justinian and his retinue, San Vitale Basilica, Ravenna. (Tripadvisor)

Venice, Italy

Mosaic: "Noah Releasing the Dove," Saint Mark's Cathedral, Venice. (Wikipedia)
In Saint Mark's, there's an entire series of murals illustrating the story of Noah, which I found incredibly impressive.

Istanbul, Turkey

Mosaic from the Chora Church, Istanbul. This is an amazing little church far from the center of the city. (Wikipedia)
Some parts of the church are also decorated with frescos.

An Extremely Brief History 

Mosaic depicting the Emperor Constantine. (Wikipedia)

You probably know this: in the year 330 of the current era, the Roman Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the Greek city of Byzantium. The city received a new name: Constantinople. The depiction of Constantine is one of the famous mosaics of Hagia Sophia.

At the time, "Barbarians" from northern Europe had taken over much of the Italian peninsula including Rome. However, emperors based in Constantinople continued to rule a substantial part of the empire, including the areas now belonging to Greece, to parts of current Turkey, to Sicily, and to other cities in Italy. Based on ancient Roman traditions, the Byzantines developed unique art and culture during their 1000 year existence. In particular, Roman mosaic art, which had largely been secular, developed into a new and rather different type of Christian art during the long Byzantine era -- as illustrated above.

In 1453, after a long series of territorial losses, the final defeat of Byzantium/Constantinople ended the empire. The Ottoman Turks took over the city and renamed it Istanbul. In the growing Ottoman Empire, Islam became the dominant religion. Though the rulers never prohibited Christian worship, the most famous Byzantine murals, those of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, were covered over by plaster soon after the takeover. The building was converted from a church to a mosque where representative art was prohibited. Today this remarkable building is neither a church nor a mosque, but is kept open as a monument to art and history. I fear that its integrity as a work of art may be endangered by current religious nationalism in Turkey.

For more worldwide murals see the weekly post Monday Murals at Colorful World.

"The House in Smyrna"

Tatiana Salem Levy is a Brazilian writer and journalist who lives in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. Her novel The House in Smyrna puzzled me! It won the São Paulo Prize for Literature for best debut novel. It's widely translated and widely praised. I enjoyed it somewhat, but in the last analysis, I don't feel as if I understood it.

Long passages in the novel seem to be really happening to the narrator, but then suddenly they turn out to be her imagination. Or don't!

Sometimes she says she's paralyzed, unable to walk or leave her room. Sometimes she speaks in the first person as herself, sometimes she speaks as her mother, or imagines conversations with one person or another. She can't speak Turkish, but when she is (or imagines herself to be) in Istanbul she suddenly becomes able to talk to people. Then she goes to Smyrna searching for her grandfather's old house, and can't talk to her cousins, who all speak in Ladino. She has long erotic encounters with a boyfriend, but they are often interrupted by thoughts, or maybe just descriptions, of other people and places. I've read books like this, but not so over-the-top!

I do like some of the author's imaginative descriptions about her past, about her grandfather's early life and departure from Smyrna to Brazil, about her parents' ordeal in hiding from the Brazilian dictatorship and their exile to Portugal where she was born. But in the end, I craved clarity -- more clarity in the writing, even if the character herself was confused or demented.

Here's a sample of a passage that I enjoyed -- and could follow!

"Last night I had a strange dream. A nightmare. I arrived at my grandfather’s house in Turkey, a big, beautiful, very old house with ornate walls, like an embroidered dress. ...

"Suddenly, I heard a loud creak. It was the door opening. A man of about my father’s age appeared, inviting me in. It’s here, come inside, come into your house. I was surprised. Why was this man speaking Portuguese? Come, he said again. When I entered, the house was full of people, young and old, and they all had something familiar about them. The men were wearing kippahs, and most — but not all — of the women had white scarves draped over their shoulders. They surrounded me, hugging me, welcoming me: This is your home, they said. The table was laden with bread, honey, apples, matzah, wine, boyos, cheese, bourekas, and almonds. Come, take a seat, we’ve made you some treats.  

"I wasn’t hungry, but the smell was so inviting that I couldn’t resist. I started with the cheese and the eggplant bourekas. But I soon realised that I was the only one eating; in fact, I was the only one sitting at the table. As I ate, they all just stood there watching me, as if I were a strange animal, an exotic jungle creature. I stopped chewing and looked for a face that I recognised. I was afraid. They all noticed and began to laugh. I raced to the door, wanting out, certain that I was in the wrong house. Then I heard a deep voice say: This is your family! I tried to open the door, but it was locked again and now I had no key at all. The laughter grew louder and louder, as I screamed: Where’s the key?  

"I woke up drenched with sweat, lying in my bed, in my room, in my apartment." (Kindle Locations 335-353). 

And another I liked, though I don't know if she was really in Istanbul or just imagining that she was there:

"I was ambling along in Istanbul’s scalding heat when I came across a cucumber stall. An elderly man was skilfully peeling them and selling each one for a few cents. Small, medium, and large cucumbers. Whole, with nothing but salt. I was amazed — it was the first time I’d seen anything like it. At the same time, nothing could have been more familiar: salted cucumbers, to be eaten as rabbits eat carrots in cartoons. When I was a girl, I refused to eat lunch or dinner without first having a cucumber, whole, with salt." (Kindle Locations 649-652). 

 It's good to get out of my comfort zone, and read an unusual author. I've read a few other Brazilian works of fiction, especially several novels by Jorge Amado, Moacyr Scliar, and Clarice Lispector. I should read more of them!

Two Books about remote cultures

Two excellent books that I read this week: Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. The contrasts between them are dramatic: they take place in two very different societies (Turkey and Japan); they are very different in narrative approach (one is a family saga lasting 70 years, the other occurs in one evening); and their characters have very different views of the world even considering the differences in the places they live. Both authors use food in very interesting ways to portray the characters and their exotic (to us) lives. As always, I concentrate on food though there are many other themes that could be highlighted.

Pachinko takes place mainly in Japan, with early episodes in Korea. It traces five generations of a Korean-Japanese family, along with family friends and connections, from 1910 to 1989. In some way, the book is a series of episodes, following a family from grinding poverty in early-twentieth century Korea to more poverty in wartime Japan to affluence in the post-war era.

As Koreans in Japan, the family members experience many aspects of being a highly disdained group without the right to become citizens. The children are bullied in school, while as adults eventually they suffer from a sense of shame and self-hatred or from direct discrimination. In the more recent generations of the family, the men seem fatally destined to earn a living by running or owning Pachinko parlors, despite their early promise as able to accomplish more. Above all, the reader is given insight into their humanity, their ability to do hard work, and for most of them, their determination to be someone despite prejudice against them.

Pachinko especially provides a detailed picture of the lives of women in the family. Their cooking skills are vital to the survival of the family in the worst situations, and the foods they cook and serve are an interesting background to the many complications of their lives. Here's a description from nearly the beginning, when the first generation of the family are working to run a boarding house for very poor fishermen and eke out a living:

"The lodging fees couldn’t go up, because the men were not making any more money, but she still had to feed them the same amount. So from shinbones, she made thick, milky broths and seasoned the garden vegetables for tasty side dishes; she stretched meals from millet and barley and the meager things they had in the larder when there was little money left at the end of the month. When there wasn’t much in the grain sack, she made savory pancakes from bean flour and water. The lodgers brought her fish they couldn’t sell in the market, so when there was an extra pail of crabs or mackerel, she preserved them with spices to supplement the scantier meals that were sure to come." (Kindle Locations 181-186).

And here, at almost the end, when the family are very wealthy, the women are still cooking, this time for a grandson's American girlfriend:

"When the frying pan was hot enough, Sunja poured a scant cup of the scallion pancake batter into it. She checked the edges and lowered the heat. Phoebe was lively and good for the boy, she thought. Her mother used to say a woman’s life was suffering, but that was the last thing she wanted for this sweet girl who had a quick, warm smile for everyone. If she didn’t cook, then so what? If she took good care of Solomon, then nothing else should matter, though she hoped that Phoebe wanted children." (Kindle Locations 6702-6706)

Pachinko is a very rich novel about the cultural and social history of Koreans in Japan in the twentieth century and how they were mistreated. The author's research, including interviews with Korean people in Japan, is very thorough as far as I can tell. Few people are aware of the details of this history -- I knew only the vaguest things about it. A very fascinating book!

Three Daughters of Eve takes place in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2016. The central character, Peri, is the dominating consciousness in the book; between the descriptions of what she does for a single evening in Istanbul are flashbacks to her childhood and to her time in Oxford, England, during 2000-2002. Elif Shafak uses food in a very interesting way, as she also did in earlier books that I've read. The entire narrative is framed by a dinner party and how the central character reacts to it. Details of each course of an elaborate and showy meal are listed, mostly at the beginning of each chapter. Example:

"The hors d’œuvres vanished amidst effusive compliments to the chef. Smoked aubergine purée, Circassian chicken with garlic and walnuts, artichoke with broad beans, stuffed courgette flowers, grilled octopus in lemon butter sauce. When she saw the latter, a shadow passed across Peri’s face. She had long stopped regarding octopus as food and pushed it away with her fork, gently. (Kindle Locations 2004-2007). 

The reason for her reaction to octopus comes out slowly as her memories take over: it's a subtle use of a literary motif. The author describes a number of Peri's fellow guests at this over-the-top meal, but names them only by their professions and accomplishments. Example:

"The desserts arrived, served on crystal plates: hazelnut-mousse cake with a chocolate-custard centre and an oven-baked quince with buffalo cream on top. The guests broke into a chorus, half of compliments, half of concern.  

"‘Ah, I must have put on two pounds tonight,’ said the PR woman, patting her belly." (Kindle Locations 2456-2458). 

The wealth of the dinner's host and the pretensions of the other guests in contrast to Peri's background are key themes of the novel. (A comparison with Mrs. Dalloway is tempting, but I'll resist.) The central character's inner thoughts during the dinner contrast these people to those she knew in her early life as a child of not-so-well-off parents. More important, we learn of her lost goals to gain an Oxford degree and her youthful aspirations be something consistent with this education. As the dinner progresses, we find out in detail about the events and relationships that brought her to this place. There's quite a bit of suspense and drama as the novel concludes -- but no spoilers here! I enjoyed reading another book by this accomplished and skillful author.

Graham Greene Revisited

From my attic: two books by Greene.

The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Stamboul Train (1932, also published as Orient Express) by Graham Greene were my reading for this weekend. I had not read anything by Greene in many years, and did not recall these novels at all. I think they appeal to me now because they depict such dark and confusing times, maybe like what's coming to us now.

The spider's web I photographed on a trail in Florida last week to me resembles the feeling of being trapped -- a feeling so vividly depicted in these thrillers. In Stamboul Train one sees the depths of the depression and post-World War I sadness, with its desperate victims. In The Ministry of Fear, it's the horrors of the London bombing raids and dangerous spy rings. 

Set in London during the World War II bombing raids, The Ministry of Fear presents an atmosphere that seems completely unreal. Confusion and destruction can engulf one's entire surroundings: sudden death from a bomb or maybe refuge in the depths of the Underground and threats from unknown foreign agents. It's a world without stability.

The novel's central character, a man, stumbles into a spy plot entirely by chance, just because he is attracted to consult an amateur fortune teller as he passes by a small fund-raising fair in a London square. She directs him to guess a particular weight to win a cake "made with real eggs" -- rare eggs said to have been donated from the rations of the people who sponsor the fund-raiser. Wartime food, wartime scarcity -- what better way to illustrate such hardships? When he wins the cake, in error of course, he is followed by someone from the spy ring. At a crucial moment in his interaction with the agent, his house is bombed and the contentious cake is destroyed. He flees, and from that moment he is completely involved and enmeshed in the spy plot, and his life taken over. The plot, involving how he finally emerges from the spider-web nightmare, is somewhat forced, but the suspense is total.

Stamboul Train begins as the famous Orient Express leaves Ostend on its way through Eastern Europe to Constantinople, as they call it in the novel. Several characters who of course could never normally know one another are drawn together because they are on this train. One, a Jew, is going on business: he is a merchant dealing in currants and raisins. Somehow everyone can immediately recognize that he's a Jew, and he is very conscious of this himself. In this respect -- remember, the novel was published in 1932, so the most virulent racism was just starting -- I find the novel and Greene's attitudes both dated and somewhat puzzling. Is he straightforwardly expressing antisemitism? Is he just reflecting the unconscious attitudes of his time? Or is there a difference? I could look up what others have written but I don't want to do it.

Other characters on the train are a Communist/Socialist activist who is returning to Belgrade for a political action, a woman newspaper reporter who recognizes him and tries to get a front-page story, a woman who has been the lover of the reporter, a young woman who expects to become a chorus girl in an English show in Constantinople, and a petty criminal who has just shot a man and is trying to escape. There's a dramatic clash with border police, as well as lots of interaction among the characters.

Finally, at the end, there's a brief wrap-up when the survivors get off the train in Istanbul. Although the Pera Palace Hotel is mentioned, none of the characters stay at this famous location, about which I read a whole book!

"An Evil Eye" by Jason Goodwin

Jason Goodwin's Inspector Yashim is a former associate of the Janissary corps. An Evil Eye is the fourth book about Yashim. Action takes place in Istanbul between 1836 and 1839, at a time when Topkapi Palace, the royal court, and indeed the entire Ottoman Empire were filled with international intrigue. Yashim is a private detective (without that title) in the service of the government. Murders, espionage, and more are his specialty. He collaborates with various officials, harem attendants and harem ladies, the Polish ambassador Palewski, and many other colorful characters. In this book there's quite a bit of important action on the Prince's Islands, one of the places I visited on both of my trips to Istanbul.

"The largest of the Prince’s Islands advanced swiftly over the sun-pricked waters. ... The air smelled of charcoal and roasted meat where the kebab vendors had set up their braziers in the shade." (Photo -- my 1990 visit, text -- An Evil Eye, p. 17)

Yashim loves to cook and eat, and all of the books in Goodwin's series contain a wide variety of food descriptions, as well as plenty of background in the exciting city and its markets. His friend George the vegetable seller doesn't play as large a role as in earlier books, but he's there too: "High summer vegetables glutted the market. Every stall was piled with pyramids of glossy eggplants, both the purple and the white; sacks of spinach, green onions, fresh beans of every shape and color, popped from their skins. Everyone sold tomatoes, even George— who made a pyramid of fruit that resembled purplish turbans." (p. 115). 

Throughout the book, Yashim purchases food and there are long descriptions of how, exactly, he cooks each dish; I've decided to concentrate on the other material, not to quote these near-recipes for dishes like fish stew, lentil soup, and various fish preparations. The streets are full of vendors as in the following passage and the photo from our 1990 visit:

A vendor's cart with simits, a type of hard roll.

"Crowds thronged the shoreline on the Pera side, and spilled through the gates that opened in Istanbul’s Byzantine walls, their appetite whetted by the scent of roasted chestnuts and corncobs grilling on little fires. A man with long mustaches raked stuffed mussels over a brazier. The simit seller wandered through the crowd, with his distinctive bread rings on a tray on his head. The sherbet seller followed him, clinking two glasses between finger and thumb, and the water man, with his tank on his back. Boys darted through the crowd with roasted chickpeas in paper bags, and the sahlep men pushed their trolleys along the waterfront, offering their concoction of sweet orchid root sprinkled with ginger and cinnamon. "(p. 254).

"The waiter set a tray before them, with the little cubes of roasted lamb,
bread, and a gypsy salad of cheese with red onion and peppers.(p. 117).
Photo: a buffet of Turkish specialties where we ate.

A view from the plaza at Topkapi Palace where some of the important
events in the novel take place. We visited Topkapi only once in 1990.

At the Grand Bazaar, where Yashim sometimes shops. On every visit,
we have been fascinated by the markets and the sellers of so many types of goods.

Along the waterside we saw the old wooden houses with docks where small boats tie up. These "yalis" have a role in the Yashim novels, as well as in several of the other books set in Istanbul that I've recently read about the 16th through 21st centuries. Every era of Istanbul history is characterized by population growth, constant building activity, and changes
in the cityscape. Fascinating!

The plot of An Evil Eye is very very complicated with tricky behavior from a Pasha (government official), Russian envoys and spies, thugs working for various interests as well as their own, Greek Orthodox churchmen, various women and girls in the harem (including the Sultan's grandmother), and many others. The personal history of Yashim is also complex, as are the relevant histories of several other characters. I'm not sure I understood every twist and turn, and I don't want to try to explain it at all -- but it's a very amusing book to read, as are all the others in the Yashim series.

"Istanbul Passage" by Joseph Kanon

"They made their way to the bridge through the Karaköy market, sidestepping pools of melted ice streaked with fish blood, strands of wilted greens. Cats lurked behind the stalls, waiting for scraps. There was more food near the steps of the bridge, stuffed mussels and braziers with chestnuts. They stopped for a minute on top, catching a breath before they waded into the crowd. ... There were water salesmen with silver canisters strapped to their backs and hamals wheeling carts and a simit peddler with a tray of bread rings balanced on his head." -- Istanbul Passage, Kindle Locations 5193-5199).

The action in Joseph Kanon's suspense novel Istanbul Passage (published 2012) takes place in 1945. Istanbul is a dark and dangerous city, full of repercussions of World War II. The text passage above, near the end of the novel, is an example of the city background that joins with the fast-paced plot to make the book quite readable. I suspect there are a few anachronisms, but that it's mainly historically accurate about the time, the politics, and the city.

Until the end of the war a few months before the events of the story, Istanbul, thanks to Turkish neutrality, had seen constant humanitarian efforts trying to escort shiploads of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe to safety. In reality, during the war many refugees died in attempting to flee, notably one entire ship full of them, the Struma, a ship that was "sent back, then torpedoed in the Black Sea, everyone down with it." (Kindle Location 566).

In the novel, one more shipload of concentration camp survivors is seeking permission to head away from Europe and the Displaced Persons Camps. They were trying to get to Palestine, which would become the state of Israel shortly afterwards, but which was at that time ruled by the British who weren't allowing Jewish refugees to enter.

The central character, Leon, has played a role in these escapes, and in the novel is trying to save one more boat of refugees. He gets mixed up in a more complex plot.  The war had caused every espionage agency to place agents in the city, and in Leon's world, the agents are all active, competing over a particular man who is trying to escape them. Leon becomes tangled in a web of motives he can't understand, facing dangers he can barely identify.

The book is full of colorful descriptions of the old luxury mansions along the Bosphorous, of both elegant and seedy hotels, of modern offices, of retro bazaars and food stalls, and much more. Quite a number of scenes take place at the Pera Palace, which is also the key location in the history I read recently, Charles King's Midnight at the Pera Palace. For example, a funeral for one of the agents:

"The banquet room at the Pera was crowded, spilling over with consulate staff and Turks who hadn’t been to the church and were now lined up at the buffet table, plates in hand. The food was American, chicken and potato salad and cold roast beef, not even a stuffed grape leaf to remind them where they were."(Kindle Locations 1359-1361). 

There's a lot consciousness of the changing ethnic composition of Istanbul -- the confiscation of property from long-term residents who were Jewish, Greek, or Armenian had constantly changed the neighborhoods in Leon's experience such as this:

"He got off near the Koç shipyards in Hasköy and walked the few blocks to Mihai’s office, an old industrial building given to Mossad by its Jewish owner before it could be seized for the wealth tax. During the war, Mossad had worked out of the Hotel Continental, and some of the staff still preferred it for the convenience, but Mihai had moved his unit down to the waterfront. Aliyah Bet, the illegal immigration, was like Noah’s ark, he’d said. It should have a water view." (Kindle Locations 1868-1872). 

 Or this explanation that Leon gives to a less-savvy colleague who asks what is meant by "population exchanges" --

"After the war with Greece. In ’twenty-three. Ethnic Greeks were sent home. Vice versa with Turks there. Whether anybody wanted to go or not. People who’d been here forever. It was a bad time. You go to Izmir, places like that, it’s still an open wound." (Kindle Locations 2329-2331).

The detailed descriptions of the city made me want to read this novel, although the genre of a suspenseful spy story isn't usually my choice of reading. I enjoyed it just the same. In the Author's Note at the end of the book, Kanon offers this explanation which I find helpful:

"The horrors of Străuleşti, the sinking of the Struma, Ira Hirschmann’s heroic work for the War Refugee Board rescuing European Jews, and the tireless efforts of Mossad le Aliyah Bet (Committee for Illegal Immigration) are all matters of historical record and appear here only as background. The events and people in Istanbul Passage are fiction." (Kindle Locations 5640-5643).

"Topkapi" -- the Film

Melina Mercouri in the film.

The film "Topkapi," (1964) was directed by Jules Dassin, and featured actors Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, and Maximilian Schell. Those were really big names when the film was new -- still not totally forgotten, I hope. I remembered seeing and loving this film at some point, and decided to see it again today (thanks to streaming video).

Dassin delivered a great combination of suspense, humor, exotic locations, and beautiful settings. The acting seems somewhat stylized by today's standards, but it's still fun to watch.

My memory is of both the entertaining plot and the great imagery of colorful Istanbul. I fear that quite a lot of the buildings and street scenes featured in the film have been leveled and modernized to make the new, far bigger city that exists today; in 1964 the population was just over 1,000,000 and it is now over 14,000,000.

Street vendors, porters, carnival workers, and humble house servants are featured in the film, and bring the city to life. Here are some screen shots from the film:

I especially enjoyed one sequence showing lots of street vendors and
street scenes with people carrying loads in the old-fashioned way.

I wonder what's at the site of these old buildings now. 

The plot: to steal a jeweled dagger from the Topkapi Palace. Here: the three thieves wait on the roof until its
dark enough to enter the building. The trick: they must not touch the floor, which has a built-in alarm.
From left, actors Ustinov, Schell, and Gilles Ségal "the human fly." 

The "human fly" descends from ropes to steal the dagger. It's a wonderful movie, perfect for my current interest in Istanbul!