The Gathering by Anne Enright

Usually, while reading a book, in my head I gather things I want to mention in the review, why I liked the book (or why not), or I make notes while or immediately after reading the book. By the time I sit down to write the review, I have composed a rough version of it in my mind or I have my notes to go on. Not this time. To be honest, I have no idea what to write about The Gathering. I don’t even know whether I liked the book or not. There are certain things I appreciated about the book, mostly I think Enright’s writing, less so the storyline or the characters.

It wasn’t until about page 200 of the 260 page book, that I was really comfortable with the story and with Enright’s writing. It took me six days, actually to read The Gathering, simply because I couldn’t read much in one sitting, after a couple of chapters, some twenty-thirty pages I had to put the book away. There is something about Enright’s writing which I ended up appreciating: it is very concise, not a word too much, very to the point, and distant. I needed to get used to the style, but eventually settled in, though the distance stayed.

There are books that suck you in to such an extent that you forget that you are actually reading a book. The Gathering is not like that. Despite feeling more comfortable reading the book later on, until the very end I remained extremely conscious of the fact that I was reading a book, letters printed on sheets of paper. Again the distance.

The narrator is Veronica, one of the nine Hegarty children. I didn’t her think very likable and couldn’t connect with her, nor with any of the other characters really. I have a feeling that Enright’s writing style had a lot to do with that. From the very beginning it was clear to me that Veronica was an angry woman. Though what exactly she was angry about, initially remained unclear. Yes, she was generally unhappy with her life, with her “high-maintenance husband” Tom, as she called him, with being a stay-at-home mom. But I sensed that that was not everything, there was something else.

The story starts when Veronica’s closest brother, Liam who was only eleven months older than she was, has committed suicide in Brighton, England. Veronica is the one who has to go get the body and bring it back to Dublin. Liam’s death makes her remember and think about their childhood. Early on, I realized that Veronica is not a trustworthy narrator: almost all her memories are accompanied by “I think…”, “It must have been…”, “I suppose…”, “I believe…” and similar phrases, casting doubt on almost everything she remembers. Were Veronica’s memories what they really are? Were they what really happened? By the end of the book, I still wasn’t sure who it was that had been sexually abused, she, her brother Liam or maybe neither of them.

After rereading this review, there is one word that stands out because I used it so much: distant. I didn’t plan on using it so often, but whenever I was looking for the right word to describe something, this same word kept popping up. I think it actually does convey rather well how I feel about The Gathering. The writing, the characters, the story, it all remained distant. Which for me does not necessarily have a negative connotation in this case.

Do you sense how much on the fence I am about this one?

You can read an excerpt from The Gathering here.

For other opinions about The Gathering follow these links (and I know that this is a book that most people either love or hate, so do check some of these other reviews out):

Laura at Musings
Jill at The Magic Lasso
Michelle at 1 More Chapter
Wendy at Caribousmom
51Stories
Pages Turned
Jessica at The Bluestocking Society

I know lots of people read this book, so if you have also reviewed this book, but your link is not in the list, either leave a comment with the link to your review or send me an email with the link. I will then add them to the list.

A Good Husband Sometimes Beats his Wife

Don’t worry, this is not my opinion, but that of a female university student from Egypt. It is also the title of a book by Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk about the year he spent in Egypt as a student in the mid-nineties. The original Dutch title is Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw. It has been translated into German, but I don’t think the book has been translated into English.

Een goede man was first published in 1998, so before 9/11 and the changing attitudes towards Islam and Muslim people in the West. However, I think that this is not a dated book, and I think it would actually still be an eye-opener for quite a few people. Een goede man is an interesting and at times absurd book about a Westerner’s experiences trying to integrate into a Muslim-society and about the lives and ideas of Egyptian university-students, written several years before the integration of Muslims became a hot topic in Holland and other Western countries. Luyendijk talked with his Egyptian friends and other young people about Islam, the Western world, love, sex, gays, Jews, women’s rights, fundamentalism etc. There are times when he wonders: “Do I want to be friends with people who think gays should be killed and that it is okay to cut off the hand of a thief or for a husband to beat his wife?” Then he considers that his Egyptian friends probably think something similar about him: “Do we want to be friends with a guy who is okay with his wife working outside the house, who doesn’t believe in any god, and who doesn’t mind if his sister walks around in shorts or has sex before she marries?”

In the book Luyendijk focuses mostly on the differences between him and his Egyptian friends. Eventually he concludes that at that time (before 9/11) people and media in the West portrayed people elsewhere (not just in the Middle-East) as “being on the road to becoming the same as us / the West”. They are just different, and their road of development is just a bit slower than that of people in the West, but eventually they’ll get to “the same level”.

During his year in Egypt, however, he finds out that the people he meets do not want to become like the people in the West, on the contrary, they don’t see the West as superior or as a model society. In the afterword he wrote in 2007 to the edition I have (printed in 2007), Luyendijk makes a very fitting comparison. He was raised to view history as a long train, the first carriage of which was the West and the first coupe in this carriage was Holland. His Egyptian friends on the other hand were raised with a similar, but at the same time very different, view on history. For them human history was also a train, but for them the first carriage was reserved for Islam, the front part of that carriage for the Arab world and on the very first bench up front the Egyptian people were sitting. At the time this discovery was a huge shift in his worldview for Luyendijk, but I think that after 9/11 it has probably become clearer to many people that maybe, just maybe, being like people in the West is not the ideal for many or most Muslims. Though I suppose there are still plenty of people who don’t recognize this and for whom reading Een goede man could still be very ‘beneficial’.

I enjoyed reading Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw, though towards the end it became a bit repetitive with the same themes popping up over and over again. It is well-written and fast-paced, at times funny (though unintentionally so) when the two worldviews bump into each other (on purpose I am not using the word ‘clash’ here) and it gives plenty of food for thought about how ‘we Westerners’ (sorry for the huge generalization here as well as in most of this post) perceive Muslim cultures and the other way around, how they see us. The book gives some insight into how people from a non-Western, Muslim culture view Western society and where these ideas originate from.

On a personal level I could relate to this book as well, though my situation of moving to Armenia was definitely less extreme than Luyendijk’s time in Egypt. First of all, Armenia is a Christian country. The problem is, that people in Armenia receive most of their information about “the West” from tv, in other words from Hollywood movies and videoclips. Go figure what a distorted image that is! A lot of people are obviously reasonable and smart enough (or they have been abroad or have friends or relatives there) to understand that at least part of that image is incorrect. But still, enough of the distorted image (especially when it comes to relationships, sex and things like that) remains.

Een goede man was Luyendijk’s first book as a result of which he was asked to work as correspondent in the Middle-East for some major Dutch media-outlets. Another of Luyendijk’s books, Het zijn net mensen (appr. They’re Just Like Humans), became a bestseller in Holland two years ago and a somewhat controversial book at that. Luyendijk wrote in Het zijn net mensen about the limitations journalists have and especially journalists working for Western media in the Middle-East: they have to deal with many limitations on the information they can gather and how they can convey this information to their audience. As a result, people in the West get a very simplified picture of a complicated region. Luyendijk claims that journalists should be much more aware of and much opener about all these limitations, about what they don’t know or cannot know and about what part of the news they are unable to tell because of lack of time, space or lack of background knowledge of their audience. I am obviously giving Luyendijk’s point in a very abbreviated form. This stance caused an uproar among some of Luyendijk’s colleagues. I read this book last summer (I think), just before I started blogging and I found it a very interesting and though-provoking book about journalism.
Het zijn net mensen has been translated in several languages (among others French, German and Italian), but not in English. You can read two articles in English about this book here and here.

Land van gebroken beloftes by Anna Brouwer

Land van gebroken beloftes: Dochters van Rusland (Land of Broken Promises: Daughters of Russia) by Dutch filmmaker and journalist Anna Brouwer consists of two parts, told in alternating chapters. One part is the family history of Lara, a Russian friend of hers who emigrated to Holland, Lara’s twenty-something year old daughter Polina, Lara’s mother Tamara and her grandmother Olga. The other part of the book is a travelogue of Brouwer’s trip by train from Moscow to Lake Baikal in Siberia together with Polina.

I got off on a really bad start with this book, because in the first few chapters about Brouwer’s travels into Siberia I already found a few factual errors and a couple more instances where I am not 100% sure, but almost certain that there are inaccuracies. Call me lazy, but after those few actual errors I didn’t feel like checking these suspected errors anymore. Apart from these errors, the use of cliches in the first couple of chapters turned me off.

Another thing that early on raised my suspicions about this book was the use of endnotes. There are only fourteen endnotes in this almost 350 page book, and they are all used to give the source of a quote. However, in probably ten or more instances Brouwer doesn’t give a primary source for the quote, but refers to another book by another author who used the same quote.

One example which will probably make clear what I mean. At one point Brouwer quotes from Alexander Soljenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, quote followed by a note. In the endnote, however, she doesn’t mention Soljenitsyn’s book as the source, but another book by a completely different author from which she had taken Soljenitsyn’s quote. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a copy of The Gulag Archipelago and find this same passage and refer to that in your endnote. There were a couple more instances where Brouwer used the same “technique”. Now I know that this book is not meant to be academic and I don’t expect it at all to measure up to those standards. But if a writer does decide to use notes to refer to sources, then make some effort and try to locate the quote in the primary sources as much as possible, especially if they are not too hard to find like Soljenitsyn’s book and Tolstoy’s works. We are not talking archival searches and recently uncovered correspondence here. It all smelled a bit too much of laziness to me, as if Brouwer had taken the easy way out.

So early on I was already thinking “Oh-oh! I hope this book doesn’t totally fall apart”. Fortunately it didn’t. What initially kept me continuing was not the travel part, but the chapters in which the family history was told. The family history of the four generations of women encompasses almost the entire twentieth century. Grandma Olga was born in 1904, long before the Revolution of of 1917, and experienced the initial hardships of the Communist regime, the First World War, collectivization. Tamara was a staunch Stalinist her entire life. Lara on the contrary became a rich business woman under perestroika and had to flee Russia in the early nineties because the Russian mafia started to go after her and her children. These chapters are the best in the book in my opinion, because they are told in direct speech, by the women themselves: They read as if Brouwer just wrote down their words and the conversations in which they recounted their past. These parts dragged me in right from the start.

Fortunately, the travelogue picks up hugely once Brouwer and Polina arrived in Krasnoyarsk. During their stay there, they experience a typical local holiday, which is a highlight for the people from the city, with concerts in the park, hanging out there with friends and children, lots of eating and especially drinking. They meet some disillusioned young people and talk with them about their lives, their lack of hope and plans for the future, their wish to get out of this city and the country, sex, drinking and using drugs. These kids are a fairly typical example of youth in provincial towns all over Russia. This hopelessness and wish to leave the country (or at the very least the village or town they live in) is something I also recognize in many young people in Armenia, which also has a lack of jobs and good education and lots of corruption. Though the use of drugs and the presence of AIDS or the extremely easy attitude towards sex are not widespread in Armenia. Which is not to say that there are no drugs or AIDS here, it is just not such a massive social problem as in Russia.

Then Brouwer and Polina meet a woman who lives in Krasnoyarsk-26, which was once (and apparently still is to a large extent) a closed city not far from Krasnoyarsk where the Soviet regime had built a plutonium factory or something like that (what exactly remains unclear from the book, but it was part of the atomic bombs industry). This woman tells them bleak and chilling stories of life in the closed city. Its inhabitants had everything, good salaries, good food, etc. What they didn’t have was good health; the woman tells of lots of babies being born with health problems, lots of people dying young from cancer. Neither was the environment necessarily very healthy: the nearby river stayed ice-free in winter (remember we are talking Siberia here), because of the cooling water from the enrichment factory being pumped straight into the river.

A recurring theme in the book, both in the travelogue and in the history of Polina’s family, is fear. This fear is still so deeply ingrained in the people: fear for the authorities, fear for each other, fear to take action or responsibility, fear that they will say or do something they shouldn’t say or do.

Another theme that makes the second part of the travelogue a lot better than the first is that of Polina’s changing attitude. Before she emigrated to Holland, she lived a comfortable, fear-free and fairly sheltered life in Saint-Petersburg. This trip to Lake Baikal shows her a Russia that she didn’t know about, that she didn’t even know existed and still exists. It makes Polina think and she has to adjust her ideas about Russia and its people and she becomes saddened and disillusioned as well.

Despite my wrong start with this book I ended up very impressed by it. It gives a very interesting picture of life in the Soviet-Union and in contemporary Russia told by the people who live(d) those lives. If this book will ever be reprinted, I sincerely hope that Anna Brouwer and/or her editor will pay more attention to the fact-checking and the references. I know it may seem something relatively small, and I probably would have minded less if it were a fiction book, but it did bug me because it was a non-fictional, documentary-like account. Brouwer and her editor won’t be wasting time, as it would improve this book from rather good to very good.

The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell

The six sisters collectively known as the Mitford Girls were not only very different and interesting characters of themselves, living in an interesting time in history, but the way their lives turned out, makes them even more fascinating.

So let me briefly introduce them. The oldest, Nancy, was born in 1904 and became a very successful writer, getting much of her inspiration from her own surroundings. Then there was Pam, one of the quieter, lesser known sisters. The two younger sisters Diana and Unity more than made up for that. Diana falls in love with and later marries Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Fascist Party, and becomes an ardent supporter of Fascism and Nazism. Unity gets acquainted with and becomes a personal friend of Adolf Hitler. In fact, Diana may have been one of the very few if not the only person who counted both Hitler and Winston Churchill (he married into the family when he married a cousin of the girls’ father) among her personal friends. Decca’s political preferences go in an entirely different direction: she becomes a communist, in the late 30s she runs off to the civil war against Franco in Spain and eventually ends up in the US. The youngest sister, Debo, was born in 1920. Like Pam, she is one of the “quieter” of the sisters, though in her own way she makes something remarkable of her life, becoming a business woman and successfully leading and expanding her husband’s estate, making it one of the few profitable estates in the country. There is a fairly recent interview with her here.

I found Decca the most interesting of the sisters, because she was the only one who actually broke free of the life and conventions of her class and ended up leading a life different from what was expected of her. She was the most unconventional of the six. The others, no matter how “funky” their political opinions, still stayed within what was expected of them by their social background. Debo and Pam, in The Mitford Girls at least, stayed a bit in the background, probably because they were the most “ordinary” of the six. Relatively speaking that is. I would have loved to find out more about them. Though for that I suppose I’d have to read one of the numerous other books that have been written about one or more of the sisters.

The most interesting part of the book were the chapters dealing with the period from the late twenties until the end of the Second World War. Anyone who reads this book cannot but read that part with hindsight, knowing what Fascism and Nazism would lead to, knowing about the Holocaust.

In fact, the same goes for Decca’s becoming a communist in the thirties. At this time Stalin’s terror was pretty much at its top. This was one question I had that didn’t get answered in this book: to what extent did Decca really believe in Communism as an ideal, a solution for economic and social problems or was Communism for her a way to combat Fascism. Or was she just some sort of fellow-traveler. Even more important, to what extent was she aware of what was happening in the Soviet Union, the Gulags, the executions and persecutions, the famines following the collectivization of the agricultural sector. This book at least doesn’t say anything about her knowledge of and attitude towards all this.

Many more pages are dedicated to Unity’s infatuation for Hitler an Diana’s support for Nazism and Fascism. During her life, Diana actually never apologized for or repented her support for Fascism. I found Diana an interesting woman as well.

Apart from the six women’s roaring lives, this book also gives a very interesting picture of upper class life in England and especially of the social mores and conventions that the girls had to cope with and adhere to in the first half of the twentieth century. One thing that struck me was how the different families were on the one hand continually selling their mansions, houses, and parts of their estates because they couldn’t afford their upkeeping anymore, moving into smaller living places all the time, but on the other they were also continually traveling abroad, sending their children to finishing school abroad, and they kept buying land and houses as well. All these changes in property were sometimes hard to keep up with. To my 21st century mind it was sometimes hard to understand the logic behind not being able to afford one thing, but at the same time spending so much money on other luxuries.

Another thing that struck me is how seemingly common extramarital affairs were in the society in which the Mitfords lived. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a prude and all this adultery going on didn’t bother me as such, it was just one of the things I noticed while reading the book. Extramarital affairs seemed to have been acceptable for both men and women, but at the same time once a woman was divorced, her social status was gone. This became very clear when Diana’s affair with Oswald Mosley was discussed in the book. When their relationship started, Diana was still married to someone else. She did push through a divorce, despite the objections of many, her own parents among them. Diana’s mother even forbade some of the younger sisters to visit Diana after her divorce.

All in all, I enjoyed The Mitford Girls enormously. Mary S. Lovell wrote a fast-paced, seemingly well researched book, that gives an intriguing look into the lives of a family that was notorious and famous at the time and also into upper-class life in England in the first half of the twentieth century in general. I highly recommend this book as an introduction into the Mitford family.

As always, if you have reviewed this book on your blog, leave a comment with the link to your review or send me an email with the link, so I can include it in the post.

The Return by Hakan Nesser

I had never heard of Hakan Nesser before, but decided to give it a try when I found The Return in the English bookstore in Yerevan. I have been craving for some good mysteries or other not too heavy reading material lately. Maybe that’s summer kicking in. Or the scales are just going in the other direction now, after heaving read more serious books and lots of non-fiction in the last year or so. The Return is the third in a series of mysteries with Chief Inspector Van Veeteren as the main character. The first two books in the series, Mind’s Eye and Borkmann’s Point are also available in English, but The Return is perfectly readable as a stand-alone book. Nesser is a Swedish author who writes mysteries in the tradition of Henning Mankell, though Nesser gives Van Veeteren and the members of his police team less personal background than Mankell does.

Van Veeteren is a fairly typical fictional Chief Inspector:a  bit of a loner; divorced with two grown-up children, one of whom is in prison; doesn’t seem to have too many friends; enjoys a beer frequently; and he likes poetry and opera. In The Return, Van Veeteren spends part of his time in hospital undergoing surgery in which a malignant tumor is being removed. This is pretty much all we find out about Van Veeteren the person.

One day a body is found in the forest. The body has been dead for months, and because the hands, feet and head are missing, identification is difficult. The body turns out to be that of Leopold Verhaven, a former track-star, who spent 24 years in prison for the murders of two of his lovers. He was murdered shortly after his release from prison. When the investigation into Verhaven’s murder raises doubts about the way the two trials were handled and it becomes clear that Verhaven might actually have been innocent, the case is closed under pressure “from above”. If two of the largest murdercases in the country turn out to have been one huge miscarriage of justice, that would surely not reflect well on both the police force and the legal system in the country. Van Veetern, being on sick leave after his surgery, nonetheless decides to find the truth on his own.

The last part of the book especially raises some interesting questions about morality, about whether under certain circumstances it is right to take the law into one’s own hands.

The one thing that bothered me about the book is that it is set in a fictional northern European country, a mixture of Germany, Sweden and Holland I suppose. It took some time for me to realize that the book is set in a fictional country. Well okay, that in itself didn’t bother me so much, what distracted me were the names of people, places, streets, newspapers. They were all a mixture of German, Dutch and Swedish with the odd Eastern-European name thrown in. For some reason this kept distracting me right until the end and I kept trying to find traces of each country in the story. There is not really any reason it should be so distracting, but it was for me. I am not entirely sure, that this fictional setting was necessary altogether; for me it didn’t add anything to the story. I think this story would have worked just as well if it were set in a real country, southern Sweden, Denmark, the northern part of Germany.

The Return is a fairly slow-paced and straightforward mystery, well-written. Despite the one big minus, I enjoyed it, the story drew me in quickly and I read it in one day. I wouldn’t mind reading any other of Nesser’s books if I come across them. I do think The Return lacks something compared to Henning Mankell’s Wallander-series, but if you enjoy Scandinavian mysteries, The Return is well worth trying.

You can read an excerpt from The Return here.

Weekly Geeks: Magazines

Dewey’s quote speaks for itself:

This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is to talk about the magazines we read. In order to get you started, I prepared a little magazines meme, but feel free to take it further if you want. I also think it’d be great if you displayed images of the covers of your favorite magazines.

For each magazine you want to talk about, here are a few questions. Answer as many or as few as you want.

1. Name of magazine.
2. Do you subscribe or just buy it now and then?
3. What’s your favorite regular feature in the magazine?
4. What do you think your interest in this magazine says about you?
5. How long have you been reading this magazine?
6. Is there any unique or quirky aspect to the magazine that keeps you reading?

I have always read lots of magazines of all different kinds. I am one of those people who reads almost any magazine from cover to cover. In fact, since I moved to Armenia, I am on an alltime low when it comes to reading magazines. There are lots of magazines available here, but they are all in Russian and a small but growing amount in Armenian. I buy a Russian magazine from time to time, but I read that as much for reading practice as for fun. I read Russian fluently, but I am much more fluent in/at ease reading non-fiction, study-book, legal texts in Russian than I am reading fiction and for-fun texts.

I used to read tons of magazines for years (all in Dutch), loads of glossies such as Elle, Marie-Claire, or Dutch non-glossy women’s magazine Viva, until I found them getting boring, because they are very repetitive in themes and they (with the exception of Viva) promote an image of women with which I don’t agree: women have to be AND successful in their career AND have a great relationship (note: with a man) AND look good AND have an awesome home AND travel a lot AND have or want children AND be(come) a great mother AND have an awesome group of friend AND AND AND. You get the picture. I don’t think that is a very realistic image of women, at the very least it is an image I don’t fit in in many ways and I don’t want to fit in. I still read women’s magazines from time to time, and enjoy it as great reading for relaxing purposes, but I have to spread it out, otherwise I go crazy.

To counterbalance that, I used to read news/opinion weeklies, some more academic journals about Eastern-Europe, and Wordt Vervolgd, the monthly magazine of the Dutch section of Amnesty International. These were only my regular magazine fixes. Next to my bed, I used to always have a stack of these plus a lot of one time purchases, freebies or other magazines that somehow ended up in my possession. I had a couple of friends with whom I would swap magazines: I received a stack from a friend and would then pass it on to another friend who would give me some of her magazines stack.

All that stopped when I moved to Armenia. All that, but one. The one magazine that I have been subscribed to since I started university in 1993 and that I still subscribe to is National Geographic. I love NG at least as much for it pictures as for its stories. I love their articles about different places and history, but I also enjoy their more scientific topics. I get to read about things I otherwise might not read much about. Not too long ago, my parents asked me what to do with the more than ten years worth of back issues of NG. After I left, my brother moved into my old apartment, but he is going to move out at the end of the summer, so a lot of my old stuff has been moved into my parents’ attic over the past few years (including my books). So what AM I going to do with them?

These days, that is now that I am living in Armenia, I get my NG fix about twice a year, either when I am in Holland or when my parents visit me. My NG is now sent to their home (the mail system is too errant in Armenia) and they collect them for me. They usually collect some other magazines for me as well, interesting issues of news magazines, some newspaper clipping about Armenia or the Caucasus region, things like that. My parents are coming to visit me at the end of next month, so I am already waiting for the new load of reading material they will bring!

Also, my brother’s girlfriend usually gives me a small stack of glossies and women’s magazines when I am in Holland. I take them with me to Armenia and keep them for the rainy days or for when I am sick, hung-over or my brains are otherwise incapacitated . S., you have no idea how much I appreciate that! Keep ‘em coming!

The Dutch magazines I receive or take with me to Armenia also serve another purpose: I use texts from them for my Dutch classes, for my students to read and discuss. And for this, the women’s magazines are actually great, because their language is not too difficult or formal and the topics are not too abstract or distant.

Here you can find out more about the Weekly Geeks.

The Bridge (De Brug) by Geert Mak

De Brug (The Bridge) is an essay about the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, which connects the European and the Asian parts of Turkey. I read it in Dutch, but it has recently been translated into English as well, so do read on, even if you don’t speak Dutch. Geert Mak is a Dutch writer whose book In Europe, a combination of a travelogue through Europe and a history of twentieth century Europe, has also been translated into English. I haven’t read In Europe yet, in part because the book became a real hype when it was first published in Holland in 2004. I must have mentioned here before that I tend to avoid books that are bestsellers, or at least I come to them late, once I realize that I am interested in the book, not because everybody else read it, but because it appeals to me. Which is why I have never read Mak’s In Europe. Though I have been warming up to the idea that maybe In Europe is worth reading and could well be a very interesting book.

More than just a history of the bridge and its place in Istanbul, The Bridge is also the story of some of the people inhabiting the Galata Bridge. Most of all the story is that of the microcosmos that is the bridge. Mak spent time with the people, earning their trust. We meet a Spanish couple living in Istanbul who come to the bridge every day to fish. We meet Oender one of the boys selling cigarettes on the bridge, the girl selling lottery tickets, Mehmet the bookseller, and many others who shared their life stories. They are all poor, many of them having migrated to Istanbul from the Turkish countryside hoping for a better life, hoping to earn enough to support their families. They are all part of what you might call the underbelly, or the almost-underbelly, of the city, people who most of us would probably ignore if we would cross the bridge. Through Mak’s writing, these people become individuals with a past, a present, hopes for the future.

The Bridge has also been translated into Turkish (link in Dutch; I couldn’t find an English reference to this), which caused a bit of an uproar, because some politically sensitive parts (Armenian Genocide or Kurds anyone?) were initially toned down in the translation.

At less than ninety pages (the Dutch edition) The Bridge is a quick read, that leaves you with a picture of life in a big city on the crossroads between Europe and Asia.