Tag: islam

Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light (Picador 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54860229-the-mirror-the-light?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9lDrpFuEIY&rank=1

Astounding! Every sentence is a jewel!

Mary Letts, Shadows on a Stone Wall (Blaize Bailey Books 2007)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5371775-shadows-on-a-stone-wall?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=80fSTrqRDP&rank=1

This is a wonderful book, with the humanity of Ian McEwan and the humour of Roddy Doyle. I’m recommending it to everyone I know who likes these authors. Plus it has the added thrill of a murder mystery and a love story.
When her mother dies in a car accident, Julia and her children go home to Spain for the funeral, an ex-pat community in the mountain village where she had spent a painful childhood.
The beautiful view she’d grown up with from the country farmhouse she has inherited is now blighted by the concrete and asphalt construction of Florida-style retirement condos for the new ‘Holidaylandia’, of which her mother had been a vocal opponent.
Then the property developers discover an ancient skeleton buried under a collapsed wall on the edge of her mother’s land—but how ancient? Neolithic? Spanish Civil War? Many villages had guilty secrets under Franco.
Impending interrogation by ‘La Guardia’ livens up the conversations at the local drinking holes, as everyone tries to remember what they got up to back then.
Those were hippie days, a time when parenting had fewer boundaries. Suspicion also falls upon the history of Euro-hippies that ‘showed up’, ‘hung out’ and ‘split’.
Practically everyone in town has some guilty secret, even the children.
The book is beautifully written, and never descends to banality. The plot is good, and the characters are profoundly likeable. The use of dialogue is absolutely perfect.
The children in the story are portrayed lovingly and amusingly, but never patronisingly, and are so real they must surely be taken from real life. They play major roles in the plot, and are multi-faceted in their own right, every bit as interesting as the adult characters.
I truly hope this book is not completely autobiographical, or if it is, that Mary Letts has more than one life story to tell.

Madeline Miller, Circe (Little, Brown and Company 2018)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35959740-circe?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=RnlnvQxeHx&rank=1

6 stars!
Divine daughter of Helios, Circe defies the Olympians by using magical herbs to interfere with the lovers Scylla and Glaucos and is banished to the solitary island of Aiaia. There she is visited by numerous personages we know from mythology—Hermes, Daedalus—many whom she makes her lover—as well as several shiploads of would-be rapists, whom she transforms into pigs. She practices her witchcraft on Jason and Medea, her sister Pasiphaë, Odysseus and his men.
Circe has powers we mortal women may envy, yet she knows her limitations. In exile, she repents and is forced to come to terms with her existence. She makes her peace with Penelope and Telemachus, even leading to new alliances.
From her spectacular debut The Song of Achilles, Miller pushes further back in time, to a magical age when gods walked among men.
And she has further honed her craft. Circe is chock full of delicious phrases. A first kiss, ‘I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.’ The god Helios, her father was ‘a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.’ Odysseus, who ‘had walked with those who could crack the world like eggs’, describes Achilles, ‘prophecies hung on him like ocean-weed’, and period-appropriate metaphors, such as ‘There were answers in me. I felt them, buried deep like last year’s bulbs, growing fat’ and ‘The sky darkened like iron’.
Following in the footsteps of Mary Renault, Miller gorgeously retells the old myths in a way modern readers can relate to. She captures evocatively what it would be like to be a goddess among mortals.

Anna Burns, Milkman (Faber & Faber 2018)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36047860-milkman?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8oLTfyWK3C&rank=1

The dark, floaty, but witty tale of an unwelcome wooing in the dangerous world of the Northern Ireland Troubles
This novel has a fantastic first line: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.’ We enter a world (Northern Ireland during the Troubles) where everything, from what you name your child—if it’s Nigel or Troy, expect beats—to what you cook—it had better not be petit fours or amuse bouches—even to what car parts you dirty your living room carpet with, is divided between ‘their side of the street’ and ‘our side of the street’.
Trying not to draw attention to herself in a dangerous environment, ‘middle-sister’ has the habit of ‘walking-while-reading’. This, however, is criticised by the gossips, especially when she becomes the unwelcome target of the amorous attentions of a ‘major paramilitary player’.
Burns has a completely unique stream of consciousness writing style, with page after page of endless tangents, which, especially toward the end, become very witty, amidst all the murders.
One technique is saying things three times in three different ways. For example: ‘being up on, having awareness, clocking everything… didn’t prevent things from happening’. She doesn’t say what ‘things’ she’s referring to, yet by that description, we learn something, get a sense of, absorb information on the feelings revolving around those ‘things’.
People and places are not named, rather being referred to as ‘maybe-boyfriend’ or ‘third brother-in-law’, ‘the ten-minute-place’ or ‘over the water’. This glides you into a sort of fantasy world, creating an ‘uncomfortable floatiness’, a sense of unease, a feeling of foreboding and threat, in the midst of which one is nevertheless chuckling.

Rebecca Horsfall, Dancing on Thorns (Arrow 2005)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1540649.dancing_on_thorns

A love story between two fascinating characters set to ballet, with poetry, tears and raptures

For some reason she can’t herself explain, Nadia Petrovna, dowager étoile from the Diaghilev era, plucks awkward Jean-Baptiste St. Michel from the Académie in Paris for a scholarship at her Islington Ballet studio.
Michel is the son of a famous choreographer working abroad, whom he has not seen in years, and after he leaves his mother for a career in ballet, they, also, become estranged.
His uncle Jim dies, leaving him a large flat in Pimlico, which he and his Italian ballerino friend Primo convert into a dance studio and party pad. Enter Jonni, who has come to London as an aspiring actress and meets Michel at a party. As boys do, Michel casually lets Jonni know he’s been sleeping with his pas de deux partner Lynne, who casually informs Jonni that ‘we’ve all slept with each other in our gang’. He rudely ignores her for 90 pages while she follows along, infatuated by him and by his world, eventually being rewarded with a lover who, despite lack of commitment, makes love the way he dances.
Michel is propelled into a lead role, and he catches the eye of Martyn Greene, artistic director of the British National Ballet. Islington’s head choreographer Charles Crown reveals his hand. Far from scrutinising his every plié out of opprobrium, as had been Michel’s impression, Crown has spotted his promise and has been moulding him for stardom. Jonni follows him, cooking for the dance troupe, as he climbs the ladder of success.
I had always heard that the world of professional ballet was a competitive, bitchy scene, but the dancers in the Islington corps, here, love each other deeply, and these profound friendships carry them through the failures and successes of show biz and the highs and heartaches of their personal lives.
In the end, in order to make things right, Michel has to confront his demons, and Jonni has to take a risk.
Many interesting characters come onto the scene: the proud, statuesque prima ballerina Annette; the handsy actor Grant Noble; the leading actress full of wise words Maggie Lane; Leum the director who swears by saying ‘oh, panties!’; Roly, who went to a (dirty world in the ballet world) ‘stage school’; Carlotta di Gian-Tomaso, nicknamed the Giant Tomato; the tutor Marcus who became Marina; Jonni’s ‘tight-lipped, fifteen-denier tan-stockinged’ mother Veronica; the fat, vitriolic arts critic Boyle.
All contribute to a story painted in all the colours of the rainbow, featuring some really beautiful writing. It’s a long novel, but I couldn’t put it down.

Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, The Origins of the Ottoman Empire (1935; this edition State University of New York Press 1991)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6918422-the-origins-of-the-ottoman-empire-soci-econ-hist-mid-east

Dispels the myths of the misty early period and outlines the factors in the formation of the early state

The dry academic style means this book is perhaps not one for the non-specialist Ottoman historian, comprised as it is of lectures by the professor. I purchased it, desperate for ideas for my novel about the daily lives of Kayis and Akhīs and their relations to other Turkic beyliks. I was disappointing in that, but nevertheless learned a lot.
For most of us, what we see and read about the Ottomans dates from the period after Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople. These lectures cover those misty centuries before that, the 7th to the 12th centuries, particularly the Seljuk and Ilkhānate periods.
Particularly valuable is the dispelling of certain myths. It is not true, says Köprülü, that the Ottomans invented their origins from the Kayı tribe during the reign of Murad II. Yes, Osman was the son of Ertuğrul, and no, he was not descended from the Prophet. The Kayı tribe was not related to the Mongol Qay tribe, and they did not migrate after the Mongol invasion of Khurāsān but rather came with the first Seljuk conquerors.
Contrary to what you would think if you’re a fan, as I am, of the Diriliş Ertuğrul and Kuruluş Osman TV series, the proselytization of Islam was not yet a major preoccupation. The Turkmen tribes were messianic, ‘anticipating the mahdī’, and used religio-political propaganda, but the Seljuk state was not theocratic, and the Ottoman state never followed a policy of Islamization. Populations in Anatolia were a mixture of Muslims, Christians and some Jews, who lived in harmony, had the same dress and lifestyle, and eventually learned Turkish.
Nevertheless, there were Christians, even Seljuk and Byzantine aristocrats who converted to Islam, but whatever pressures of a religious nature were applied were carried out more for political than for religious reasons. The privileged position of Muslims in the state organisation and desire to avoid jizya non-Muslim taxes were a factor. Köprülü contends that widespread conversion only occurred in the 15th century after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.
Köprülü defines and outlines the political and religious affiliations of many groups we know of from this period, such as the various beyliks and religious orders. It’s untrue that Hājji Bektāsh, founder of Bektāshism, met with Ottoman rulers and played a role in founding the janissary corps. Unfortunately for my novel’s purposes, the Akhī women’s organisation Bājiyān-ı Rūm (Sisters of Anatolia) is probably fictional (but I won’t let that stop me from writing them into my fictional storyline).
The major causative factors for the Ottomans’ rise (to summarise) were:
• Their geographic location
• The absence of hostility from neighbouring beyliks
• Conditions favouring their entry into Europe and the Balkans
• Elements of the population on the borders allowed them to capture Byzantine territory
• In the Ottoman state, all power was under one ruler, not divided among the brothers and sons
• A rapid conquest spreading westward coincided with Turks from Anatolia wishing to migrate
• Ottoman conquest promised much booty and not many casualties, and prisoners were educated to become soldiers
• The janissaries became a major military force during Murad I
• Ottomans divided captured land into timars to grant to veterans, which were required to provide soldiers in proportion to their income
• Ottomans continued the state organisation of the Seljuks, influenced by the Ilkhānate
• Early rulers—Osman, Orhan, Murad—were skilful leaders