Customer Reviews

Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 2003 in Istanbul, fifty three years old widow Dr. Ada Ergenekon dies from cancer. Her husband renowned mathematician Mursel had been murdered twelve years ago. Their twenty-seven years old only child Arda feels relief to no longer be under the thumb of his powerful mother; one week after her death he pronounces his freedom by ending his engagement to Jale, who was more acceptable by his late mom than him.

On his thirty-seventh birthday, Bedirhan Ozturk gives himself the ultimate present. He decides to retire from his vocation of twelve yeas as a hired killer. He is proud of his accomplishments of only taking out those who committed deadly crimes especially against his religion but managed to remain free due to the political cracks. Bedirhan feels strongly he can quit as he has not taken more than two hits a year.

Arda feels a need to track down his father's unknown killer protected by the religious groups. Bedirhan feels a sense of urgency to track down his unknown handler protected by the religious groups. Their goals will collide.

Several fascinating twists starting with Arda meeting and gaining assistance from novelist Selcuk Altun turn what looks to be a revenge thriller into much more as the audience anticipates the confrontation, but is not sure where the collision will lead to. Rotating perspective between A for Arda and B for Bedirhan, fans learn of each lead character's back-story with further references to literary and musical multicultural Turkey. With each chapter the reader feels increasingly a sense of a surrealistic tour of Istanbul inside a colliding universe that represents modern Turkey's struggle to balance religion and secularism.

Harriet Klausner

I like reading different styles from different authors and usually meet with the author through their fiction. In fact in this book author did put himself in it as a side character; not really liked by the protagonist but hey everyone has an alter ego that hates themselves, finds impossible to live with.
There is more than one reason why you wouldn't like this book. Too many references, too many name droppings and the two main characters does not even meet till the end and for some people that meeting is short (at least for my father it was). In order to be perfectly objective, if you take out the fact that I am Turkish, I might have not enjoyed this book. If one must give an example, the references were made to the old Istanbul requires at least some faint knowledge of them.
However the story line grabs the reader without much effort, and in a way all these references makes the reader feel like an observer rather than connecting with the characters. Probably that will draw more audience in US, since you cannot expect someone to feel connected with any one of the main characters, who live in Turkey and have distinctively different backgrounds than your average Joe.

I read a lot of translated fiction and a lot of crime fiction from around the world, and I regret to report that this semi-thriller from Turkey failed to connect with me. The story unfolds in chapters alternating between the first-person narrations of two very different characters. We meet a 27-year-old heir of a wealthy Turkish family leading s a meandering unfulfilled life of the mind until the death of his overbearing mother is the catalyst for him to dump his fiance and look into the murder of his father a decade and a half earlier. Meanwhile, the second is a poor orphan who grows up to be a moralistic contract killer. It's revealed in the early pages that the latter happens to be the killer of the former's father, and it's clear that the alternating chapters will eventually climax in a face to face meeting between the two.

However, before that happens, there is quite a bit of meandering around the forgotten landmarks, monuments, gravestones, and neighborhoods of old Istanbul, introspection, literary references galore, and even the postmodern appearance of the author as a fairly significant character in the story. The walking tour of Istanbul is likely to be of limited interest to readers who've not been to the city themselves. The introspection of the various characters is suffused with a kind of melancholy heaviness of spirit known in Turkish as "huzun" which weights the whole book down. The literary references (book titles, poems, authors, aphorisms, oh my!) accumulate in such profusion that they become rather obtrusive and overbearing. As for the author's appearance as a character in the story, well, that's either to your taste or isn't. In the end though, while bits and pieces are certainly interesting, there's nothing particularly thrilling about any of it. The author has written several other books, and at least one of these (Many and Many A Year Ago) is now available in English, but my appetite for more certainly wasn't whetted with this one.