I Am Istanbul

April 29, 2013
Uzuner (The Sound of Fishsteps) attempts an admirable but rather impossible task: squeezing the turbulent and massive history of Istanbul into a novel brimming with all its sights, wonders, and conflicts. The narrator is the city itself: "Queen of Queens, City of Cities" and "object of the world's desire," Istanbul addresses the reader with a grand, overwhelming voice. Characters from all walks of life populate the novelâa cleaning lady, a bartender, and a successful businessmanâand their storylines faintly follow the main character Belgin's final return to the city, after years spent abroad, to act on her love for Ayhan. Uzuner's obsession with mosaic-style representationâaddressing religion, East versus West, the "hijacked culture" of Turkey, being an "outsider" at home, and ethnic minoritiesâproduces two-dimensional characters that merely mouth lines assigned to them, trying to explain what is special about this city. Their voices lack believability or strong emotional pull: after a while they begin to sound like regurgitated Wikipedia pages. These lengthy explanations disturb the flow of the novel, making it a prime example of telling and not showing. Sadly, this novel comes closer to being a "Turkey 101" course rather than an engrossing work.