Like a Sword Wound
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A "magical, marvellous" epic of an empire in collapse: Book one in the acclaimed Ottoman Quartet by the award-winning Turkish author and political dissident (La Stampa, Italy).
Tracking the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire, Ahmet Altan's Ottoman Quartet spans fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-WWI rise of Atatu¨rk as leader of the new Turkey. In Like a Sword Wound, a modern-day resident of Istanbul is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, finally free to tell their stories "under the broad, dark wings of death."
Among the characters who come to life are an Ottoman army officer; the Sultan's personal doctor; a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family's legacy; and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader. As their stories of intimate desire and personal betrayal unfold, the society that spawned them is transforming and the sublime empire disintegrating.
Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace, written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters.
"An engrossing novel of obsessive love and oppressive tyranny, a tale of collapse that dramatizes the fateful moments of an empire and its subjects." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vibrant, psychologically acute novel the first of a planned quartet by the Turkish author Altan (Endgame), currently in prison on specious charges of aiding the 2016 coup against President Erdogan depicts a moribund Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century. In modern-day Turkey, Osman wallows in his fetid apartment, visited by the garrulous spirits of his ancestors and their contemporaries, who "speak freely under the broad, dark wings of death." The ghosts reanimate the political, spiritual, and social life of a bygone Istanbul, a city "that has baffled everyone for a thousand years." Personal betrayals play out amid world historical dramas; the titular "wound" refers to the torment of love, which, like the Ottoman sultan himself, exerts an unchecked absolute power. A renowned sheik, Yusuf Efendi, presides over his monastery of dervishes but can't shake his lustful obsession over his ex-wife, Mehpare Han m, whose equally besotted new husband is the cosmopolitan son of the sultan's physician. The spiritual leader aids a wayward young officer, Ragib Bey, who, disenchanted with the Ottoman army's cronyism and an empire "governed by gossip," is drawn into a growing conspiracy against the paranoid sultan. This is an engrossing novel of obsessive love and oppressive tyranny, a tale of collapse that dramatizes the fateful moments of an empire and its subjects.
