Birds Without Wings
Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres is one of those books that halfway through it – I debated about whether to stop reading it and move on or not. I did manage to slug through it and now feel like I devoted way too much time to a cumbersome book that should have been condensed to half it’s size.
The book took place from 1905 to about 1930 in a small village in what at the time was the Ottoman Empire. The book piqued my interest in the first place, because I do not know a lot about Turkey and thought that an epic story set in a small Turkish village would be interesting and enjoyable. And in that aspect – it was satisfying because of the many colorful characters. There was ” The Dog” who was the crazy man of the village who had been tortured by being forced to bite down on a red-hot iron rod that had been forced into this mouth; Philothei, one of the main characters, who was so beautiful that she had to veil herself so as not to drive the men crazy and Ibrahim the Goatherd who begins the book a hero and ends the book tragically. The half of the book that described the characters and their day to day living was a good read, and it was certainly interesting to see how this town had Muslims, Christians and Armenians, and until WWI and the Turkish independence – they all lived happily together.
Where I thought the book totally went off course was the second plot which focused on Mustafa Kemal who became the first leader of independent Turkey. While it was informative and necessary to the plot to understand how Turkey evolved from the Ottoman empire to an independent nation, it was extremely complex and the author went into excruciating detail about battles during WWI, battles during the Greek/Turk war and all of the varying politics going on in Europe and Russia. I couldn’t keep up with who was allied with whom nor did I care.
I believe that the author should have narrowed down the scope of the book to a story about a village and not have tried to bring all the early 20th centurty politics and war into the story. One very interesting fact that I learned though – when Mustafa Kemal became leader of Turkey, he proclaimed it a secular, Muslim nation and expelled all the Christians (from the entire country) to Greece! In turn, he invited all the Muslim Greeks to return to Turkey. But rather than this having a uniting effect, it actually pushed the country into depression, because the Christians were the merchants and businesspeople of the country – interesting historic fact.
In sum – not worth the time to read 500+ pages.
February 7, 2005 1:39 pm 
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By DJ Cayenne, February 8, 2005 @ 8:21 am
I found this period of history interesting – as in ‘holy crap, they did what?’ kind of intresting – when reading about it in the beginning of Middlesex. I had heard good things about this book (well, it made the best of list from last year). So it goes.