Customer Reviews

Birds Without Wings

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS is a rare specimen in the genre of historical novels: a success. It is a compelling, readable, and historically credible tale of love and tragedy at the time of the Ottoman collapse in Turkey. Told from multiple points of view, with chapters narrated by the diverse cast of characters themselves and biographical segments on the career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, this novel tells the story of how modern secular Turkey was forged out of the crucible of the Balkan Wars, World War I and the Greek War of Independence. The narrators are the ordinary men and women -- Christian and Muslim, Greek and Turk -- of a small village near Telmessos (now Fethiye) in southwestern Turkey. The stories they tell of war, loss and survival are fully human and utterly heartrending. I will not soon forget de Bernieres' sorrowful depiction of the cross-deportations of Greeks and Turks from lands they had inhabited for centuries. Neither will I forget the dignity and romance of characters like the aga Rustem Bey, his mistress Leyla Hanim and the village imam Abdulhamid Hodja.

If you're looking for old-fashioned storytelling with vibrant, lifelike characters who inhabit an artfully recreated historical world, I highly recommend Louis de Bernieres' BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS.

"Birds Without Wings" is an exceptionally beautiful novel that takes place during the waning period of the Ottoman Empire, in the small Anatolian town of Eskibahce. As the story opens, an ethnic mix of Turks, Armenians, and Greeks, both Muslims and Christians, are living side-by-side in a comfortable and relatively peaceful existence. But first the Franks, as the Ottomans call the Western Europeans, and then the Greeks invade their homeland. These events set off a cataclysmic chain of events that tear apart the lives of the residents of Eskibahce. The Sultan declares a holy war against the invaders. The Muslims are conscripted as soldiers and the Christians are sent into labor battalions. The Armenians are evacuated from the region in a death march. The Italians occupy Eskibahce. The Christians are forced to relocate to Greece. Throughout it all, the residents struggle to survive amidst the turmoil.

Although this novel does an exemplary job of bringing alive the history of Turkey, there is far more here than a recounting of historic events. Told in alternating voices, viewpoints, and time periods, this story is panoramic in scope as it follows more than a dozen principal characters and a large cast of secondary ones through a series of interrelated story lines.

There are the childhood friends Karatavuk and Mehmetcik, who are inseparable until war breaks out. At that point, Karatavuk becomes a soldier who participates in the hellish battle of Gallipoli, and Mehmetcik, who is forced into a labor battalion, later defects and becomes a brigand. There is the beautiful Christian girl Philothei, who is betrothed to Ibrahim the goatherd and whose death is foreshadowed at the start of the story. There is the landlord and town protector Rustem Bey, who casts out his adulterous wife and takes a mistress. There are Abdulhamid Hodja and Father Kristoforos, holy men who call each other infidels yet are good friends. Interspersed throughout the story are chapters on the life and career of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who moves up the military ranks to win the fight for an independent Turkey. There are merchants and craftsmen, madmen and beggars, prostitutes and scholars. Each has a tale to tell. The main focus of the book is really the town of Eskibahce itself, rather than any one character.

De Bernieres provides a rich portrayal of his characters. The language is lyrical, and some of the vignettes have the cadence and color of folk tales. At times the story is painfully sad and sometimes it is humorous. It reflects the full spectrum of compassion and suffering, love and hatred, pride and shame, tolerance and persecution. It brings home the horrors of war and prejudice. Iskander the potter, who likes to quote proverbs, says, "Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrows." Birds are present throughout the story. They sing throughout the night, carry letters to the dead, have their voices captured in clay whistles, and live in cages outside the entrance to many homes. The town residents are portrayed as wingless birds that are grounded in the reality of war and unable to flee the turmoil.

This is not a quick read, since it contains a lot of historical background and details about the forces that brought about the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Republic of Turkey. There are some Turkish words that are not defined and must be deduced within context (a short glossary would have helped). But the book tells a memorable and masterfully written set of stories that capture the heart and soul of the Turks. It is a powerful epic with an important message. Highly recommended.

Eileen Rieback

I bought this book along with Dido Sotiriou's 1962 "Farewell Anatolia" following their recent review in The Economist. Both books tell the same story: that of two people living in relative peace alongside each other for centuries, of friendships, of common languages and blurring differences between faiths and customs... until the beginning of the 20ieth century. They explain how the Turks and Greeks wounded each other during the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, 1914-18 First World War and 1919-22 Greek campaign.
Birds without Wings is entertaining (short chapters, each from a different character's perspective; great prose), human (more about people than about history), and eye-opening. As a Greek, it made me want to learn more about what has united us with our neighbours, as well as hopeful that our younger generations will develop stronger ties with each others countries.

This quote from Birds Without Wings sets the book's tone. "All men are brothers" is a theme weary from overuse. Yet de Bernieres manages to portray it in a novel fashion within an unexpected environment. In school most of us learned of "the Sick Man of Europe" - the Ottoman Empire that once wrapped the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. "Corrupt" was the word usually applied. Throughout the 19th Century the Empire was chipped away by rising nationalist forces. Within the Empire's core, however, de Bernieres portrays a land of ethnic mix, kept stable by a tolerance for neighbours. The dominant Muslims appeal to the Orthodox Christians' Mary for aid. The Christians, in turn, recite prayers while prostrating in the Muslim fashion. A Greek teacher writes letters - in Turkish, but written in Greek script. All these elements are skillfully woven in this masterpiece of fictional history.

Yet, as de Bernieres chronicles, this tightly integrated society, typified by a village on Turkey's southwest coast - Eskibahce, was shattered. Riven by hostilities, broken up and rendered a pitiful remnant - why did this idyllic situation fail? Not Ottoman "corruption" but the forces of "European Civilization" intruded on these people's lives in devastating ways. To the people of Eskibahce, all Europeans are the mysterious "Franks". There are German Franks, French Franks, British Franks, even Australian Franks - all Christian, but as Eskibahce will learn, not the Christians they are familiar with. Whatever else these Franks are, they intrude on the Ottoman society and politics. The Empires built in Europe during the 19th Century, chipping at the Ottoman hegemony have now erupted into a Great War. Eskibahce's sons go off to fight, but the demands of war prove greater than simply acquiring cannon fodder. "It was an age when everybody wanted an empire", de Bernieres writes, undertaken with no thought to the cost.

De Bernieres uses a full stage of characters to weave his story of two decades of tumult and change. Few are admirable, but all intensely human - birds without wings. Rustem Bey, a Muslim landlord, travels in search of a replacement "wife" to portray the ways of Ottoman cities. A Muslim boy - inevitably - is stationed in Gallipoli. Through his eyes we are given an uncompromising picture of war's horrors. And its lighter moments. Philothei, a beautiful baby, becomes lovelier with maturity. It's symptomatic of the author's sense of irony that her beauty brings demands to veil her face - even though she's Christian. All the women then adopt the veil to pretend beauty. A potter saves needed money to buy a gun - for what purpose? One figure, however, pervades this story - Mustapha Kamal. He will change the Ottoman Empire into the nation of Turkey. In so doing, everything Eskibahce represents is swept away with devastating results.

With a string of excellent writings to his credit, de Bernieres has here produced a masterpiece. It takes immense skill to create a continuum from so many and varied parts, yet he achieves it admirably. "Where does it all begin?", he asks. The book is a response to the query, but not an answer. War, the great destroyer, has many causes and unexpected results. The Ottoman Empire is transformed into Turkey, a more easily identified entity - a whole derived from parts. In Eskibahce, the effect is schism, disaffection and dispersal, leavened by compassion and generosity. Are there winners, or merely survivors? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Birds Without Wings is a bit of a departure for De Bernieres as this is an actual historical novel based largely on discernable facts and including identifiable historical events. While grand landscapes are nothing new for De Bernieres, typically his entire palette is fictional or powered by grand historical forces such as WW II without any specific identifiable historical context other than the time frame in which the story occurs.

This is essentially the story of the circumstances leading up to the creation of the modern state of Turkey. It is told through two separate but intertwined tales, the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the life and death of a young village girl and the village she lives in.

The novel contains all the hallmarks of De Bernieres best work-unforgettable characters and landscapes, great social/societal upheaval, stead fast love, conflicts of honor and loyalty, much humor and more tragedy.

De Bernieres writing style is dense, voluptuous and entrancing. He weaves a tale that captures one's attention and, moreover, creates the opportunity for great emotion attachment to the characters, all of which are drawn with tremendous depth, compassion and humanity.

This is a truly great novel. The fact is that De Bernieres is not just a great writer but one whose prose, style and craftsmanship improves with every outing. My fondest hope is that here is much more to come from this author.

I can unreservedly recommend and all of De Bernieres books, but this by far is his best.

It is the turn of the twentieth century in a small coastal town in Turkey, two or three days' travel from Istanbul. The author painstakingly and vividly etches this town into our imaginations by allowing us to spend time with its characters. Each character is clearly and powerfully sketched. Many tell us their own stories in their own voices. There is a skilled potter who, in addition to making pots, makes bird whistles that create the sounds of the birds they resemble. There is his son who learns to write his Turkish language in the symbols of the Greek alphabet from his best friend who is being taught by the local schoolmaster of the local Greek community. Each character is lovingly sketched and de Bernieres manages to get us to fall deeply in love with even the oddest, the cruelest, and the most curmudgeonly. In short, he creates a perfectly adorable litte feudal town that we find impossible not to love dearly.

In the distance we here the rumblings of a coming storm. Nationalism, a force that has been sweeping across Europe, reaches the Ottoman Empire, smashing it like a stone does a porcelain plate. And in its wake comes World War I. This war, the rallying cries of nationalism and religion conspire to destroy everything that we have come to love about this little town without so much as a single shot being fired within its boundaries.

If books were beverages then the first half of this book would be fine cognac; powerfully sweet, heady, rich, robust. And impossible to take in quantities larger than a sip at a time. The second half of the book is a little more like cold water that one gulps down to quench a thirst. In this case it is the thirst to find out how the characters we have come to love bear the torments of a world gone mad.

Of the pieces of fiction I have read in the last year, this must easily be my favorite read. It is not clear to me how closely the events portrayed in this work of fiction adhere to the historical facts of that era, but the treatment strikes me as being fairly even handed and generally consistent with the incredibly tiny bit of knowledge I have of that era . There is plenty of institutional cruelty, gratuitous meaness, and stupidity on the parts of all groups; And a great deal more human kindess than one might expect on the part of all people. It is a powerful and scathing repudiation of the ways these institutions have failed humans and a powerful celebration of the human sprit's defiance of the sins of those institutions. Highly recommended.

This novel is an easy way to get a history lesson of the development of what is now Turkey. Set in the background of the First World War, it describes life in a small settlement where life has been going on pretty much as it always has for centuries. Here life has intertwined Christian and Muslim traditions with little friction, indeed with humor. But the world intrudes.

The invasion at Gallipoli and the rise of fanatical religion and nationalism destroy the fabric of centuries-old peace. Parallel with the story of the small town is the story of Kemal Ataturk, the defending general at Gallipoli who is now considered the founder of the Turkish Republic and its first president.

Well researched, this book presents the history of the time and place in a way that is delightful to read and educational.

The first thing that strikes you is the wonderful prose, which, while completely natural and unforced, is poetic and descriptive.

The story, mostly told at a leisurely pace, is about a mixed Muslim-Christian community in Eskibaçe, a small hill-side town in western Turkey during the period from about 1881 to 1922, that is from the last years of the Ottoman Empire to the period after the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire had collapsed and modern Turkey was ethnically cleansed of its Greek-Christian population. We learn a great deal about the history of the region, (for instance about the little-known origin of the Turkish hatred for the Armenians), and the chapters about the villagers are interspersed with 22 chapters describing the rise of the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal, somewhat irritatingly and unnecessarily written in the historic present, with the narrative (compressed where the narrative about the villagers is expansive) sometimes being far from clear. I think, in fact, that the novel would have been even better if the account of manoeuverings and intrigues of Turkish and international politics, overlong in the last third of the book, had been left out.

The early chapters describe the two communities living peaceably together, occasionally intermarrying, their children playing together, the imam and the priest being colleagues. It is a society with superstitious beliefs in each community, but with a large cast of characters who are painted with affection and humour - quite especially so the local Aga or village leader, Rustem Bey. There is, however, a darker side, too: an adulterous wife is stoned nearly to death; there is an honour killing of a Muslim girl who has become pregnant by a Christian; in one scene a crowd is excited when a usually respected Armenian member of the community is kicked nearly to death by a drunken Christian; in another, a group of drunken Alevis (Shi'ites) maltreat a Greek schoolmaster in a similar fashion. Even so, there is much more love than there is hate in this village, and much grief in the course of the story because of it.

Half-way through this long book, Turkey enters the First World war. Sketching the historical background to this, De Bernières shows a picture for which few western readers, brought up on the story of the Bulgarian Atrocities wrought in 1875 by the savage Turks, will be prepared. He presents the tolerant Ottoman Empire as having been the victim of a prolonged and little-reported `holocaust' (his word) going back to 1822, in which Turks had been sadistically massacred or driven out of their homes by generations of Balkan nationalists.

And now that the war has started, the horrors multiply: the Armenian inhabitants of Eskibaçe are cruelly deported, the local governor arranging for their fiercest enemies, Kurdish tribesmen, to escort them. The deportees included the doctors and pharmacists of the area, and there is noone left to help the villagers in their sicknesses and diseases. One of the simple young men from the village fights in the Gallipoli campaign, and his memories of this killing field, vivid and even poetic, are among the highlights of the book.

The end of the First World War ends with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and parts of Turkey proper being occupied by the victorious powers. In Eskibaçe it all begins quite pleasantly. The Italians are occupying the region, to forestall the ambition of the Greeks to create a Greater Greece, and a platoon of Italian soldiers arrives in the village and establishes good relations with the Muslim villagers. (The author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin is as fond of the Italians as he is of the Turks.) The Italians would have done so with the Greek villagers as well, had not the local Orthodox priest furiously ordered his perplexed but obedient flock to have nothing to do with Catholic heretics.

But the Italians do not stay long. They are recalled by their government in 1919, soon after the Greeks have landed in Smyrna higher up the coast, and a new war had broken out between Greece and Turkey. The atrocities committed by both sides in this war are horrific and culminate in the revenge of the Turks on the Greeks and the Armenians when they recapture Smyrna.

The war was brought to an end with the treaty of Lausanne in 1922 by which Greece and Turkey `exchanged' their Christian and Muslim populations. The Christian villagers of Eskibaçe knew nothing about this treaty until the day before they had to leave their ancestral homes in one of the most heart-breaking scenes in the book, with the Muslim population wailing to see their Christian friends depart, and some of them even escorting them to their embarkation point at Telmessos and helping them to carry their loads.

I have two very minor criticisms of this quite magnificent, humane and moving book. We could have done with a glossary of Turkish words at the end; and the map on the inside cover is grossly inadequate, though it is understandable that it does not show Eskibaçe, for the name of this village is fictitious, perhaps to protect the beautiful real place, near Telmessos (now Fethiyeh), from a flood of tourists who have read the book. In vain: for the place has been identified as Kayaköy, and tourists are pouring in to see what had become a ghost-village after the Greeks had been driven out: in actual fact Kayaköe (or Karmylassos, to give it its Greek name) had been predominantly Greek.

For the first half of the book, I absolutely could NOT put it down. Realistic, engaging, and at times humerous...I was sure I had found a new favorite....and then I got to the War section. Watch out. It gets difficult. It's still amazing. Just that it is so darn realistic and so darn TRUTHFUL, that it may be hard for fellow tender-hearts to read. I still read it and got a lot out of it, but I had to put it down for sometimes as much as a week to get through it. Still, it is well worth the read. It was a challenge, and in fact, that is exactly WHY it is well worth the read. There is so much in this book that is relavent to what is going on in the global scene today (and therefore relavent to what is going on in our personal communities, as well). And this book encompassed the big and the small pictures beautifully.

One more word of caution: De Bernieres uses phrases and words of Turkish fairly often. If you have any background in Turkish, you will like this, But I can see how it might be annoying, though it should be easy to put in context. Work around it and give the book a try.

I have not read anything by Louis De Bernieres prior to this book, and my reason for reading this novel was a very intriguing review. Birds Without Wings is set in a small town in southwestern Turkey named Eskibahce, in what once was ancient Lycia. The town is home to a great variety of people: Muslims and Christians, rich and poor all more or less living at peace with each other in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. The characters are sharply drawn with an eye for detail so that one conjures up an image as to who this person looks like and how they act. Each chapter is concerned with a particular character or happening and is written utilizing different writing persons: at times we are addressed by characters as if they are speaking to us, sometimes the character is writing a memoir and other times the author adopts the third person giving Mr. De Bernieres the opportunity to explore his characters deeply. In the first chapter, we are introduced to a tragedy that runs in the background of the novel: a daughter named Philothei has been born to Christian parents, an extraordinarily beautiful we are told she is fated to die young through some indiscretion. Each chapter build upon those that came before it so we get to know, and care about, the people of this quiet village as distinct individuals.

As I read the book, I came to like some of the people more than others and looked forward to chapters written about them. Of special interest is Rustem Bey, the richest man of Eskibahce but unfortunate with his wife who loves someone else. His quest for a Circasian mistress was especially engaging and humorous. The chapters about Rustem Bey run throughout the book to the very end and he (for me) comes to symbolize endurance and constancy. The nobility of character and wisdom clearly stands out for Abdulhamid Hodja who saves a woman from being stoned and has a special love for his horse named Nilufer. Then, there are the odd characters like the Dog who lives in the ancient tombs near the town and eats insects.

There is a threat of history running through the novel as the biography of Kemal Attaturk is related from his beginnings, his education and the stirrings of reform among army officers, through the First World War. These chapters fill in the events that are going on of which the town is for the most part ignorant about. There has been some criticism of how the war is handled these being boring chapters of the book: I did not find it that way. The chapter where Mr. De Bernieres relates the hostilities between Christians and Muslims from 1821 until the outbreak of the First World War informed me of atrocities that I had not known about and deserves to be better known. The holocaust of the Second World War was neither the first nor certainly the last in atrocities committed against people because of their religious faith or ethnicity and the relating of this part of history served to connect the hostility between Christians and Muslims to the events unfolding today.

I also found the telling of the battle for Gallipoli through the eyes of Karatavuk to have been particularly effective; we learn about the fighting, about the war and the life of a soldier from someone engaged in the daily struggles of a soldier, and the horrors of war. We know what Karatavuk knows about the soldiers he is fighting (whom he calls Franks) and make his discoveries along with him as the battle continues, the attacks waste lives and he learns more about the men he is facing. Along with the memoirs of Karatavuk are short chapters relating the war from the perspective of Kemal that provide an historical background to the battle. The war has drastic changes for the town as anyone of military age is taken by the army, each household suffers loss and privation and their animals are even sacrificed to the war. Perhaps most horrifying was to rounding up of the Armenians, forced to leave their homes and march away to certain death.

It would take a book to adequately explain and discuss all of the characters and events of Birds Without Wings; the book recreates a social order and way of life that in many ways has not changed. This is one of those very moving books that create a world in itself that draws the reader inside and, if open minded and patient, can change their perspective.