Tag Archives: fifteenth century

The Elephant in the Seraglio: The Architect’s Apprentice

09 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: The Architect’s Apprentice, by Elif Shafak
Viking, 2014. 424 pp. $28

Jahan, a twelve-year-old Indian boy, arrives in sixteenth-century Istanbul escorting a white elephant, Chota, as a gift for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Since Jahan owes his arrival and new job of elephant trainer to subterfuge and the intercession of a greedy, vicious Christian corsair, the boy’s path won’t be smooth. Nevertheless, as a mixture of ambition, reckless curiosity, and blind naïveté, Jahan carves out a remarkable career in the sultan’s menagerie. He knows little about elephants per se but has a bond with Chota, having grown up with him, and parlays that into a recognized position at the palace. Chota is widely considered the most astonishing beast in the menagerie, so his trainer comes to notice. He even attracts Princess Mihrimar, the sultan’s only daughter, and the two teenagers have a flirtation, mild in itself but serious enough to get him killed — slowly — were the wrong people to find out.

That might be enough adventure for a dirt-poor lad from nowhere special, but there’s more. Jahan receives a palace education and comes to the notice of Mimar Sinan, the Chief Royal Architect, who takes him on as an apprentice, one of four he employs. Between the corsair, who expects Jahan to steal jewels for him; the princess; the rivalry among the apprentices; and the chance to design and construct beautiful buildings with Sinan, The Architect’s Apprentice has plenty of story to keep the narrative moving. Throw in court intrigue, which includes the quaint Ottoman custom in which the newly crowned sultan has his brothers strangled to secure his throne, and there’s a lot going on.

Princova_mešita, or Prince’s mosque, Istanbul, designed by Mimar Sinan (courtesy Ondřej Žváček, via Wikimedia Commons)

This narrative bounty, not to say superabundance, naturally cuts two ways. You get an amazingly broad picture of sixteenth-century Istanbul and an appreciation of how precarious life can be, even — especially — for the very fortunate. Shafak covers theme after theme: religious intolerance, the warfare state, architecture as a philosophy, jealousy, the meaning of love, where true happiness lies, the purpose of genius, and what humans value most. That last notion prompts me to assume that putting a white elephant at the novel’s center is intentional symbolism. Nobody sees Chota’s soul as Jahan does; in fact, they don’t know or care that the beast has one. And if you like, Jahan may even be Melville’s Captain Ahab in reverse, since Chota, his talisman, is purer than any of the greedy, back-stabbing schemers who populate the palace.

But because there’s so much narrative in The Architect’s Apprentice, it’s necessarily episodic. At times, this sweeps you away, like a magic carpet through an exotic world that no longer exists. At others, I want Jahan to grapple more deeply with his black-and-white attitudes. For him, the elephant in the room is how he idealizes those he loves and can’t or won’t see their flaws or the dangers they present to others, himself included. His loyalty is touching, but it can be stubborn too, and he seldom allows others to challenge his code.

Consequently, toward the end, when he comes to realize a few truths he’s been hiding from himself, it feels sudden, dragged in, perhaps. However, Shafak does an excellent job of pulling the disparate pieces together. The episodes lead somewhere, after all, to a conclusion worth waiting for.

The scope and subject demand rich, effortless prose, without artifice or self-consciousness, and Shafak delivers, as with this paragraph describing Jahan’s first look at Istanbul:

Jahan glimpsed partly hidden female faces behind latticed windows, ornamented birdhouses on the walls, domes that caught the last rays of sun and lots of trees — chestnut, linden, quince. Wherever he turned he saw seagulls and cats, the two animals that were given free rein. Perky and pert, the seagulls soared in circles, diving to peck at the bait in a fisherman’s bucket, or the fried liver on a street vendor’s tray, or the pie left to cool on a windowsill. Nobody seemed to mind.

The Architect’s Apprentice offers a look — rare to this reader, at least — of an unfamiliar time and place. Shafak writes with authority and conviction, and the result is a lovely novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Flesh and Faith: The Painter of Souls

18 Monday Jul 2016

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Herod's Feast, Salome's Dance, painted by Lippi between 1460 and 1464, Prato, Italy (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Herod’s Feast, Salome’s Dance, painted by Lippi between 1460 and 1464, Prato, Italy (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Review: The Painter of Souls, by Philip Kazan
Pegasus, 2015. 261 pp. $25

One pitfall of biographical fiction is the elbow-in-the-ribs aha! moment, when our protagonist meets the great and renowned on his or her way up the ladder of fame. Such scenes afflict The Painter of Souls, a novel about the fifteenth-century Florentine Carmelite painter Fra Filippo Lippi. Not only does the young–and I mean young–friar run across such luminaries as Donatello and Brunelleschi as easily as rolling out of bed, they instantly recognize his talent and praise him generously, to which he rubs his sandal in the dust and utters the Italian equivalent of “Aw, shucks.” Meanwhile, the prior gives Fra Filippo every bit of leeway, impressed with his gift, which surely comes from God, and sees no reason not to let him paint church frescoes and altar pieces under the tutelage of lay artists.

Despite these happenings, which sometimes seem too good to be true, I like The Painter of Souls. What saves the novel for me is its good-natured, winning protagonist. Pippo, to his secular friends, likes a drink, a game of dice, and has sexual fantasies about the paintings of Eve that adorn church walls. His father died when Pippo was six, and his mother has been virtually catatonic from grief ever since, leaving the boy to fend for himself. He’s learned how to beg, scrounge for food in garbage heaps, rob market stalls, fashion crude pens and ink to make drawings of passersby for pennies, and share his gains with the gang to which he belongs. Pippo comes dangerously close to letting that dead-end life swallow him altogether. Entering the church has saved him.

However, he doesn’t take well to the discipline. He wants to, but he misses too much of the outside world to accept his new surroundings, especially the restraint, which he finds excessive. The silence of the convent feels “heavy, deliberate, enforced,” its purpose to stifle noise except at prescribed times, as with bell ringing or the ponderous closing of cell doors. Pippo loves the sky, the sights, sounds, and smells of Florence, the taste of roast meat and the good grape, the glimpse of a pretty face. Or more than a glimpse, which of course leads him to sinful daydreams. How he reconciles all that with his religious faith, his desire to believe, makes the story worth while. Constant contact with painters unbound by monastic rules only increases the temptations, which he tries to channel toward its acceptable object. Beauty is divine, therefore re-creating it in religious art serves God. If, however, the act of creation involves a little transgression here and there, well, He’ll understand.

Consequently, it’s not Fra Filippo’s strengths as an artist, nor his seemingly effortless rise to fame, that make The Painter of vSouls worth reading. Rather, it’s Pippo’s weaknesses as a friar and a man that propel this novel–the whoppers he tells on the spur of the moment; the deals and excuses he makes with himself so that he can still feel honorable; his delight in the forbidden; and the pull his former life still exerts on him (and its vivid portrayal in Kazan’s deft hands). Pippo understands that he’s a sinner, and though he loves nothing more than to paint, part of him fears accepting the offer of a dispensation to remain a friar while still becoming a member of the painter’s guild, a privilege offered to very few. Who is he, a sensualist with a brush, or a man of God?

While he’s weighing this question, an artist he’s working for brings him to a barber, after whose ministrations Pippo looks in a mirror for the first time in his life:

He is looking at an almost round head, an elongated sphere, domed like a cannonball above, and gleaming from the passage of the razor. His chin is round as well, dimpled. He had no idea his mouth was so wide. There is a hunger implied in the fleshy, almost feminine curve of his lips which he finds disturbing. He looks into his own eyes. They are heavy-lidded, dark ink-brown, close-set but large, watching him, watching themselves. The irises dart, gathering, betraying an appetite, a need for satiation. This face is thinking, how will I draw you? How will you draw me?

Pippo has one other endearing trait that helps counteract the smoothness of his career arc. He believes that there’s good in everyone, and whenever he can, he uses social outcasts as his models, finding grace in them that no one else does. It’s hard to quarrel with that, and with The Painter of Souls, even if the story seems incredible, at times.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fear the Modern Age: Harvest

23 Monday Feb 2015

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Review: Harvest, by Jim Crace
Doubleday, 2013. 208 pp. $25

The day after harvest, two ominous fires darken the sky above a remote English village. One has damaged the outbuildings at the manor house and killed the master’s doves. The other comes from a hut built overnight just outside the village, an act of settlement that customarily grants the visitors the right to stay a week. What starts as a sober, calm inquest into the master’s loss and curiosity about the newcomers sparks into something else: another, broader conflagration that consumes reason, traditional ties, fellow feeling, common decency, and respect for life.

Such is the elegantly simple premise of Jim Crace’s masterful Harvest, whose sole adornment is a prose that feels neither old nor modern:

 

The countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you. It wants to dish out scars and bruises. It wants to give you roughened palms and gritty eyes. It likes to snag and tear your arms and legs on briars and on brambles every time you presume to leave the path. But this was precisely what I liked most about this village life, the way we had to press our cheeks and chests against a living, fickle world. . . .

The narrator is Walter Thirsk, born outside the Village (its only name) and married into it a dozen years before. He’s thoughtful, perceptive, hard-working, loves the land, worships the memory of his late wife, and has a keen sense of right and wrong. His great flaw, however, is that he often talks himself out of following his moral instincts, preferring to keep silent and hope for the best–like most people, in other words.

It’s not just the two fires and their aftermath that concern Walter, who, by chance and his nimble mind, soon has information that his neighbors don’t know yet. His privilege comes largely through his relationship with a stranger who comes at the master’s behest. The newcomer’s features, clothes, and beard look nothing like the villagers’, and his limp and physical frailty arouse scorn, to say nothing of his profession. He’s a mapmaker, and he’s come to render the fields and boundaries of the Village on paper.

A theoretical plan of a medieval village. Note the green spaces, which represent common lands. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

A theoretical plan of a medieval village, from William R. Shepherd’s historical atlas, 1923. Note the green spaces, which represent common lands. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Why he’d do that puzzles the villagers, who look on uneasily, and for once, they’re right to be suspicious. However, Mr. Quill, as Walter dubs the mapmaker before he learns his real name, is only the messenger of the new order, and the only character who risks speaking his mind at the injustice he’s quick to perceive.

Harvest unfolds in small movements, tiny but significant actions to which the villagers have no ready response. Crace leaves the time period unspecified, though details of dress and weaponry suggest the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. But that doesn’t matter. He’s more interested in the timeless theme of how people face a coming revolution in the way they live.

The name he’s chosen for his Everyman is also evocative. Joan Thirsk was a highly respected, influential historian of rural England, and she died in 2013, the year Harvest was published. Crace has inhaled the history and breathed life into one of the finest novels I’ve read in years.

The British press reports that he says it will be his last. Say it ain’t so, Mr. Crace.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Novel I’d Bring to a Desert Island: The Dream Maker

02 Monday Feb 2015

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Review: The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Europa, 2013. 421 pp. $27

This book is that rare volume whose insight, inspiration, and artistry make me give thanks I know how to read. Rufin’s creation follows the grand tradition of André Malraux or Albert Camus, as a novel of ideas, among other things; The Dream Maker is fine literature, maybe great literature.

Jacques Coeur's palace in Bourges (Courtesy 37-online.net, Loire Valley tourism site)

Coeur’s palace, Bourges (Courtesy 37-online.net, Loire Valley tourism site)

Jacques Coeur was a midfifteenth-century son of a furrier who became the richest man in France. In Rufin’s premise, his genius rests in the way he dreams of what doesn’t exist. From a childhood misadventure that nearly costs him his life, he conceives a startling, revolutionary idea: that power based on intelligent governance is superior to that of brute force. Later, as a merchant traveling to the Levant (which he has yearned to visit ever since a pelt salesman brought a live leopard to his father’s fur shop), he understands the transformative force of commerce. Not only is it more effective than war as a way of life or path to wealth, it changes people by providing what makes life worth living–new ideas, security, pleasures, comfort, beautiful surroundings, art. Of course, commerce also corrupts, through money, and Coeur learns a lot about that, sometimes the hard way.

He plans carefully and waits years to meet his king, Charles VII, but when he does, France’s future takes a dramatic turn. Charles harnesses Coeur’s ideas (and wealth) to expel the English and end the Hundred Years War, while suppressing the squabbling war lords who kept the country divided. But having lived through how Charles abandoned Joan of Arc to her fate after she gave him his throne, Coeur knows that Charles will betray him, too, someday. It’s when and how that someday will arrive, and what happens in between, that forms the core of this novel.

Before I found The Dream Maker, I’d thought to write a novel about Coeur myself. I’m glad I didn’t. Rufin aims higher than I’d have ever imagined and captures the man’s inner life, with which he sustains the tension that, for me, never flags. That’s not to say you don’t get the cat-and-mouse politics with Charles, the voyages overseas, a clandestine romance with the king’s mistress, or other exciting events. You do, in elegant, masterful prose, neatly rendered in smooth translation. But Rufin goes further. Throughout, Coeur explores what these events mean about how humans treat each other and what they portend for a world moving toward what we have called the Renaissance. And as I read Coeur’s take on fifteenth-century power and its uses, how men and women regard each other, what wealth signifies (or doesn’t), and the politics of betrayal, I saw how his story describes what’s happening now, all over the world.

Given that, you won’t be surprised when I tell you that Rufin is a founder of Doctors Without Borders and has visited the killing grounds of Bosnia and the Sudan. He has also served as France’s ambassador to Senegal and in a ministerial capacity in Paris, so he’s well qualified to parse the themes he’s chosen in The Dream Maker. But perhaps most important, he grew up in Bourges, where Coeur came from, in the shadow of his palace that still stands.

Rufin has Coeur remark that this house, however magnificent, is unremarkable for the stones that built it, for stones have no need of man. What matters are the dreams that lie behind it, and Coeur hopes others imitate him by closely following their own. “The only thing that belongs to us,” he says, “is that which does not exist, and which we have the power to bring into the world.” I humbly take that as a lesson.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book for the purposes of review.