Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [59]
For books on all of Turkey, I use the Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, and Rough Guide series. I also very much like the lesser-known 101 Must-See Places in Turkey, by Saffet Emre Tonguç and Faith Türkmenoğlu (Boyut, 2007). This is the number-one best-selling guidebook in Turkey, now available in English. Profusely illustrated with color photographs and packed with tips on where to stay, where to eat, how to travel, and what to do, I think this is an indispensable guide for readers traveling beyond Istanbul (though twenty-six pages are devoted to Istanbul). What’s different about it, first, is that the two authors are Turkish and, in their own words, offer “a little bit of guidance, but not so much that you are drowning in it; a book that leaves room for your own discoveries; one that tells you something, but not everything; one that prompts you but doesn’t force you.” Additionally, the authors provide anecdotes, stories, and other recommendations throughout. Available through Nettleberry (see Miscellany, page 566).
Fiction
Ali and Nino: A Love Story, by Kurban Said (Overlook, 1999). This wonderful novel, which is at once a great love story and an epic tale of two cultures converging at the time of World War I and the Russian Revolution, is also cloaked in mystery. The book was originally published in Vienna in 1937, and if not discovered in a secondhand bookstore in postwar Berlin, it may never have seen an English translation and we would not have this splendid tale. Kurban Said is a pseudonym for Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905 to a wealthy family in oil-rich Baku, on the edge of the Caspian Sea. He escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and ended up in Germany, where he also wrote under the name Essad Bey.
If you become as curious as I did, track down “The Man From the East,” by Tom Reiss (The New Yorker, October 4, 1999), in which Reiss and publisher Peter Mayer go to Vienna to meet with a lawyer, Heinz Barazon, who claims to know the true identity of Kurban Said. And read The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, also by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), which is the most up-to-date account we have of Said’s life. More fascinating details may be found on this book’s Web site, Theorientalist.info.
The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak (Viking, 2007). Though Istanbul is in the title and is the main locale in the novel, this is really a bigger book about Turkish issues at large. It was the best-selling book of 2006 in Turkey, but Shafak was prosecuted by the Turkish government for “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code. The charges were eventually dropped. Shafak’s other novels are also worthy companion reading: The Gaze (Marion Boyars, 2006), which earned her the Union of Turkish Writers’ Prize in 2000; The Flea Palace (Marion Boyars, 2007), a best-seller in Turkey; and The Saint of Incipient Insanities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004).
Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernières (Knopf, 2004). An absolutely wonderful, moving, sweeping saga of history during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and World War I. One character who may be considered the main narrator is Iskander the Potter, who early on briefly sums up what is to come: “Much of what was done was simply in revenge for identical atrocities, but I tell you now that even if guilt were a coat of sable, and the ground were deep in snow, I would rather freeze than wear it.”
The Black Book (2006) or any of Orhan Pamuk’s other novels: My