Constantinople

CONSTANTINOPLE, the second volume of the Istanbul Triptych, continues the narratives set out in its predecessor Byzantium, while bringing minor characters from the first novel to the forefront and introducing new narrative voices. Mustafa, the aging man who wrangled with property rights now finds himself in love and possibly in mortal danger. Mehmet Aral, the poet, sets off to write an epic poem about the historical conquest of Constantinople, but why this subject that seems to hold no personal interest for him? We glimpse the unnamed expat Teacher’s earliest days in Istanbul when he and his eccentric roommate Sait share an apartment which might just be the absolute center of a city of millions. Zeynep, the high school student from the first novel, explores the origins of the suburb she grew up in while trying to square this with her own sense of identity. On top of all this, we read a series of postcards addressed to the reader from a visitor to this overwhelming and mysterious city.

The types of narrative range from third-person novel to first-person memoir, from letters to literary criticism to a long-form poem. As different as the various narratives are, at their root they have the common theme of invasion (of a house, of a city, of a civilization, of nature) and the way that past transgressions are viewed in the future. Constantinople is a novel about characters who have to find ways to explain their own pasts to themselves and understand how they have come to be the people that they are today.

The safest contemporary comparison might be the structural complexity of David Mitchell’s novels meets the contemporary Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk, but the novel also has shades of Ben Lerner’s expat tale Leaving the Atocha Station and the unconventional romance of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. On a deeper level the novel’s thematic and stylistic peers are as various as King Lear, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and of course The Alexandria Quartet.