Losses of multiple kinds
Written: Jul 25 '08 (Updated Jul 25 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: voice
Cons: rather restrained and spare
The Bottom Line: an elegant protest novel
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Yasmine Ghata - The Calligraphers' Night |
La Nuit des Calligraphes (The Calligraphers' Night, published in French in 2004, in English in 2006), the first novel by French writer Yasmine Ghata (who was born in 1975) won the first ever Prix des Lecteurs d'Herblay and the second Prix découverte Prince Pierre de Monaco.
The book is a posthumous fictional memoir of Ghata's grandmother, Rikkat Kunt, who was born in 1903 and died in 1986, and was a female calligrapher. Being a female in an all-male profession would be difficult enough, but Rikkat's talent, augmented by aid from the ghost of Selim, an elderly calligrapher when she was learning the art, blooms precisely at the point in Turkish history when calligraphy in Arabic is least valued, and indeed highly suspect.
The resolutely secular republic established by Ataturk made writing in Arabic a crime in 1928, when a Latinate alphabet for Turkish was imposed. The language was also purged of Persian and Arabic loan-words. The calligraphers had to stop writing hadiths (sayings attributed to the prophet) and lines from the Qu'ran and could only draw botanical figures. (They could have drawn human or animal forms, but were too orthodox for that.) Rikkat and others in effect had to pray in secret, writing on evanescent media such as steamed-up windows.
Eventually, she found employment repairing old Ottoman texts, both in Istanbul and in European collections -- including the Louvre, where her grand-daughter studied Islamic art (Ghata also studied at the Sorbonne).
The wispy book (a number of its 126 pages are blank) begins "Now that I am dead I no longer have to count the minutes. My memory is intact; memories are more tangible than reality. My life flashes past in front of me at the speed of light, assails me and then withdraws without warning. All that I could not grasp while still alive comes back to me intermittently. I am a witness to the visible and the invisible: now I can tell the whole story."
The "whole story" includes not only her once-exalted but during her life suspect art, but her two marriages, each of which produced a son. The first was to a very chauvinist dentist, Ceri, who was a master of extracting teeth but had little interest in human beings other than their mouths: "The human race was of no interest to him, not even his wife --too healthy for him, difficult to manipulate and to fit into his classifications." Ceri took up a position in Ataturk's new capital of Ankara. Rikkat did not like the Anatolian interior and returned with her son Nedim to the family villa on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.
Her second husband is a very pompous, very lazy Albanian aristocrat whose lectures drive everyone mad. When he leaves (for Lebanon, and, later, Paris), he takes along his son Nour -- who is placed in a Catholic school and baptized as Jean.
Mother and son eventually reconnect (letters from Nour are included in the text). She visits Paris and he returns to his (wooden) childhood home before it is demolished and replaced with a much larger concrete structure.
With an appropriately ghostly, mysterious cover,* The Calligraphers' Night is an alegy for lost family (Nour and a family secret), a lost country/empire (the Ottoman caliphate), and an endangered, condemned tradition (Arab calligraphy). That is a lot of losses for one slender text, evocative as its prose is.
I bogged down in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red despite its murder mystery overlay. Perhaps I would also have if The Calligraphers' Night was less slender a narrative.
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* What look like sawed off square columns are groynes, concrete blocks along the shore to stop coastal erosion. One of Istanbul's most remarkable structures is the imperial cistern across from Hagia Sophia, with Greek and Roman marble columns rising above the semi-dark waters. See my posting on sites of Istanbul -- and also my review of Pahmuk's reflections on decaying Istanbul.
An interview (in French) of Ghatta can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEsxh7GiG1Q.
She is the daughter of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata.
Although mostly set in Turkey, the book was written in French, and the Prix des Lecteurs d'Herblay is given to a book written in French by an author resident in France, so I think it counts as a French find for Barbara's revived writeoff.
© 2008, Stephen O. Murray
Recommended:
Yes
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