Byzantium

BYZANTIUM opens with an older man named Mustafa trying to secure a piece of property from a group of squatters whom he sees as slowly destroying his neighborhood. In his investigation of the house he finds an antique coffee grinder with strange markings on it—an object which becomes a point of intersection between the lives of him and the five other people who come to possess it in turn. 1) Mustafa, whose narrative has elements of a detective story, negotiates the byzantine world of Turkish property inheritance laws and the Greek culture that existed there before his, visiting the city’s church baptistries, cemetery vaults and government bureaus for the information and documents he seeks; 2) a junk-man pushes a cart through the city, buying and selling antiques, adhering to his philosophy of balance and musing on the nature of physical objects; 3) in a fictional biography, an ambitious young poet comes to a boarding school in Istanbul, falls in love and works through intense self-doubt as he develops his own unique vision as a writer; 4) in a picaresque tale, an American teacher unlucky in love follows a series of unusual paths chasing ever-elusive gratification; 5) a devout young woman delivers a lengthy confession after suffering a crisis of faith when she gets romantically involved with the wrong person; 6) lastly, you, the reader of a guidebook, explore the city as a tourist, but the guidebook seems to have its own agenda.

The themes that tie the different narratives together are inheritances (of objects, of property, of a city); the idea of the rules that govern us (in legal matters, in work, in love, in religion); the way that places acquire meaning; and the notion of foreignness, as no character entirely belongs to the world he or she inhabits. Byzantium is a novel about a multi-layered, labyrinthine and unique city and about people from different walks of life who must navigate it.

The most accurate contemporary comparison is Cloud Atlas meets the novels of Orhan Pamuk—but deep down its real influences are as wide-ranging as Bleak House, As I Lay Dying, Italo Calvino and The Alexandria Quartet.