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Ahmet Altan, book review, corruption, epic, historical fiction, literary fiction, love, masculine pride, nineteenth century, omniscient storytelling, Ottoman Empire, passion, power, protest, sexism, sexual freedom, shame, social change, tetralogy, Turkey, wisdom
Review: Like a Sword Wound, by Ahmet Altan
Translated from the Turkish by Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi
Europe, 2018. 340 pp. $18
In late nineteenth-century Istanbul, Sheik Yusuf Efendi meets his fiancée the day before their wedding and is frightened. His seventeen-year-old bride-to-be, Mehpare Hanim, is too beautiful, and that’s an unfavorable omen.
Sure enough, things go badly between them, and soon Mehpare winds up divorcing the sheik and marrying someone else. But in this novel of restless characters struggling to see within themselves and to find out what their dreams are, it’s not who loves whom that matters as much as how they love, and what they do when that connection does (or doesn’t) work. In the process, one thing these restless souls learn is that the Ottoman Empire in which they live is deeply flawed and cracking apart. Something must be done.
Consequently, Like a Sword Wound explores passion, desire, power, and wisdom, and how they entangle, which seldom happens as planned, or at least not for long. Wisdom seems to get the short end of the stick, for Altan’s characters make tons of mistakes, some of which alter the course of history. Their own lives fluctuate similarly; moods change like the weather. The title comes from how one character defines true love, so take that under advisement.
The cast of this sweeping drama includes the sheik; Mehpare; the sultan’s personal physician; the physician’s ex-wife and son; army officers; and others, some of whose names leap out from the history books. Like a Sword Wound is the first volume of a tetralogy about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Turkey; the final installment appeared recently.
Altan deals forthrightly with corruption, poverty, superstition, political back-stabbing, oppression of women, masculine pride (which often leads to violence), the suppression of minorities, and religious fundamentalism. It may not surprise you, then, that given these themes and those of subsequent volumes, which apparently condemn the Armenian massacres and persecution of the Kurds, he’s been imprisoned several times. That assault on free expression suggests that less has changed since Ottoman times than his jailers would like to believe. But in any case, world literature is the richer for his magisterial voice.
Altan’s omniscient storytelling takes getting used to, particularly his habit of telling how his characters feel and explaining them to the reader. But here’s a twist: this novel examines the many ways in which feelings like pride, desire, or the pain of thwarted love affect everyday decisions, about which the author has astute observations to offer.
For instance, Mehpare represents female sexual power, and Sheik Efendi, how to come to terms with loss. Neither is a fully rendered character in the sense I’m used to; the novel lacks those. Even so, each figure draws me in, because, as adept practitioners of the trait they exemplify, they show it in myriad guises, sometimes in larger-than-life fashion.
Unlike the case with lesser novels in which a character has one or two dominant traits, these people never bounce from emotional point A to B and back. Rather, they move in new ways, so they acquire a certain breadth, though not complexity.
Altan’s rambling prose style also takes getting used to, but when you do, it’s mesmerizing, as if someone were narrating the story to you out loud. Consider this passage, in which Mehpare’s future second husband regrets returning to Istanbul from Paris, and what he believes it will mean for his future:
To marry was to lose the dream of returning to Paris one day, the dream that, even though he knew it would never come true, he kept within him like a beautiful garden that no one could see, a magical bay where mermaids sang, a secret paradise in which he took refuge; to marry was to vanish without a trace for the rest of his life on a barren and silent mountaintop. Even though he would never be able to go back to Paris, he would never give up this dream; the dream was almost more important than Paris.
If there’s an obvious weakness in Like a Sword Wound (aside from occasionally sloppy proofreading in this edition), it’s the female characters. Since the novel criticizes the sexism that defines and shapes Ottoman society, it’s hard to pinpoint the author’s intentions, but women in this story matter only as sex objects or mothers holding the fort against all obstacles.
The two most important female characters, Mehpare and her mother-in-law, conduct a fascinating duel for dominance, but neither is much of a thinker or doer aside from the manipulations they attempt. That bothers me and makes me wonder whether that’s how Altan views women, but I suppose the other three volumes will clarify that.
Meanwhile, the first one is brilliant and beguiling, and I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.