Marion James's Blog – September 2007 Archive (4)

Houses often form an important character in a book. Just think of "The Lake House" in the film of that name. Click on my review in today's paper for another house that is the eponymous hero of a Turkish book ....

http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=2088

The 2005 Independent Newspaper "Best Foreign Book of the Year" - The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak - certainly doesn't have a compelling plot.

What it does have, though, is three clever styles of writing:

1. The whole book is a "story within a story" - a bit like peeling away the layers of the onion skin. Some call this style Kafkaesque.

2. Play on the names of characters. e.g. Injustice Pureturk suffers terrible injustices (a style most famously associated with allegories…

Famous Turkish author Buket Uzuner would give this question a resounding YES. She once wrote an essay entitled "My soul-mate İstanbul, ex-husband Paris and lover New York."

This emotional relationship with the city is encapsulated in "İstanbul Blues", the subject of my Turkish book review this week:

http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=1942

Edwin Starr asked the Question in his Motown hit record, and he answered it as "Absolutely Nothing!"

No, this blog post is nothing to do with whether troops should be in Iraq or not .... but today's book review is about an Empire that spent nearly 850 years fending off attacks from neighbors before it finally succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453:

Click here to join readers in Turkey exploring "Byzantium at War":…