Orhan Pamuk has been on my to-read list for a long while.
This book did not disappoint. I kept forgetting that Mingheria was not a real state.
There was lots of real history in the novel, I found out lots about the Ottoman Empire that I did not know.
I could actually imagine life in Mingheria, but was glad not to be there whilst the plague was rife.
Brilliant characters, great imagination, and I guess that although non-fiction lots of research was required.
Just a little too long for my taste, but I did like the fact that the narrator was involved with the author and the storyline.
I will definitely be looking out for more of his books.
Thanks to Orhan for a great novel and my thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

A Plague on All Their Houses....

****

Pamuk's latest work is, at first glance, a straightforward narrative, using a framing device of a fictional daughter of (The real) deposed Sultan Murad V, dealing with an outbreak of plague on a fictional Mediterranean island in the confused, dying years of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, viewed from different angles it could be a satire on the bureaucracy and paranoia of a failing state, an observation on the nascent nationalism that ate away the Ottoman state from within, a meditation on the responses to the recent pandemic, a murder-solving puzzle, or a veiled commentary on Erdogan's attempts to re-contextualize Turkiye.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Orhan Pamuk’s new book, Nights of Plague, is, as the name suggests, mainly about the psychology of plague. I think it is quite brilliant on this and full of well informed and meticulously imagined insight into what happens when people are confronted with the monstrous mortality of bubonic plague.

The book is set in 1901, when social measures, especially quarantine, were all that rationally stood between populations and annihilation. Nonetheless denial and resistance for ideological and religious reasons were powerful forces. For all our recent advances in medical knowledge, including our ability, if not will, to deliver vaccination solutions, we have seen people here responding to our current pandemic in very similar ways to those described in the book for the Mingherians.

But the fictional island of Mingheria, which lies in the eastern Ottoman Empire somewhere between Istanbul and Alexandria, is about to tell a much more complex story about the nature of that empire in its declining years as well as about the rise of a small nation, perhaps having things in common with other small nations.

We are expecting some complexity as we unravel who is in fact narrating this story during the course of the book. This person, a woman, Mina Minghera, who seems to know the author we know, appears as a historian telling the story from the letters of one of the key protagonists.

In that story, we also find people motivated by one objective can often find themselves doing something quite different, only to be remembered heroically for events which have often become unrecognisable after the protagonists have gone. Sometimes the protagonists themselves fall under the spell of their own heroism.

Turkish prosecutors are supposedly looking yet again at whether some of this fictional narrative is offensive to the memory of Kemal Ataturk or to the Turkish flag. I do hope sales of the work will convince the authorities to stop making Turkiye look ridiculous themselves.

This is a long book. Maybe the pace could have picked up on occasion, but, for me, this is the most accessible of Pamuk’s novels and it is well worth the read.

Historical fiction with all the accuracies and facts, but god it was pretty dry. Feels like reading newspaper. Pretty sad because Mr Pamuk is one of my favorite.