Turkey---It's More Than Just Ruins

books:


	• Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place Mary lee Settle Touchstone, 1992 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Turkey---It's More Than Just Ruins

Everyone who writes a book about their travels around the USA, or on life in some part of it, is not required to write sections on the genocide of the American Indians or on slavery. They MIGHT, but it's not how we need to judge the quality of the book. Similarly, books on Turkey do NOT have to have judgements or pronouncements about Armenians. Turkey is a lot more than that awful chapter in human history---and as we all know, there are a lot of awful chapters in almost every part of the world, especially if a major power is concerned. If foreign writers are going to discuss that particular series of events in Turkey's past, they should attempt to get their facts straight, or at least present both sides of the question and let readers decide. I believe this book could have let the whole issue drop. No matter what you think, it is true that modern Turks cannot be held responsible for what happened 90 or more years ago.

The author lived three years in Bodrum, a coastal town in Turkey, back in the 1970s. Sixteen years later, having written a very successful novel set in the country, she travelled around to all the places she'd not seen the first time. She had connections: people at the US Embassy, Turkish professors, and even a famous Turkish-American music mogul. How she happened to know all these people is never explained. The reader accompanies Settle on a voyage through the ruins of ancient civilizations and through her own past---but just the three years in Turkey, not any of the rest. She waxes long and romantically over the variegated ruins that carpet Turkey, from all the civilizations that have come and gone---Hittite, Phrygian, Urartian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman---and even remains from the War of Independence in 1920-22. While ruins can make you ponder on the past or on the follies of Mankind, I don't think a country can, or should, be judged on its ruins. What happened to the daily life of the modern Turks, their politics, their plans, their economic successes and problems, education, women, Islam, music, food, literature, art? We learn that Turks are sturdy and hospitable, tough and charming. I don't quarrel with that, but it's shortchanging readers to call this a book on Turkey. It's a book about a trip to see ancient ruins. OK, fair enough, if that's your bag you'll disagree with my three stars. But Settle repeats herself quite often, using similar phrases or images, and she likes to romanticize her own feelings. TURKISH REFLECTIONS is really that: Turkey reflects the author here and she reflects it back. Any word of criticism is like a hen's tooth. Though sensitively composed, I wouldn't recommend this book for people who want to understand more about a country in the real world.

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The Mellowest of Reflections

A most pleasant evening's read. Not really a book I would recommend to guide anyone planning a first trip to Turkey, as it is a bit too intellectual--i.e., reflective, and its greatest appeal will probably be to anyone already familiar with Turkey. However, maybe it is the kind of book that a first-time traveller to Turkey should read after having gone through the nuts and bolts travel guides. Sprinkled throughout are some wonderful word pictures, such as the description of the great Kangal dogs that actually brought a tear of recollection to my mind's eye--I was menaced and reduced to admiration more than once by these awesome creatures when I lived in Turkey. Settle's writing made me instantly feel I was right there with her. Her brief evocation of the panic-stricken French girl deep in one of the Cappadocian caves was heart wrenching.

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don't believe everything you read

I read this book on a bus ride from Ankara to Istanbul in the hopes that it would help me decide where I wanted to go on my next visit to Turkey. As far as that went, it was a fine book. My itinerary for the next trip is set. But most of the time I found the book quite irritating. The Mother Goddess stuff was a big turn off. The author always made it sound like this stuff is just true, and everyone knows it, but almost everything she said about Amazons and the Great Mother of Anatolia is pure conjecture. And then she seemed to feel such a strong need to be an apologist for the Turks, and that got annoying too. I understand there are a lot of ancient hostilities between the Greeks and the Turks, the Armenians and the Turks, etc., but it seems to me you can love Turkey, and love the Turks as a people, and still recognize that over the course of their history they've done some pretty heinous things. Even if the Armenians sided with Russia during WWI, and I'm sure some did, the genocide was so hugely disproportionate, and pretending it didn't happen is no way to come to terms with history. It's like Americans who don't want to talk about slavery or the genocide of the Native American population or the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. I guess I just don't see why the author felt like she had to side with the Turks against all opponents, as if they were the poor innocent victims of history. Sometimes they have been, and sometimes they haven't, and you can say the same for pretty much any nation or ethnic group, including, say, the Greeks. Bottom line, the book catches much of the flavor of Turkey and takes readers along to interesting places, but it would have been better if the author didn't state as apparent fact things that are very much in dispute. Maybe she doesn't claim to be a historian, but most people will have no reason to question the historical remarks she makes, and plenty of them are wrong.

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Too nice

This might be interesting as a guide book if you're visiting some of the town in central Turkey , such as Sogut, Polarli and Kangal ( sorry for the spelling, Microsoft Word can't do those Turkish umlauts and I's without dots and g's with squiggles) that she talks about. They're off the beaten tourist track and I suspect that's with good reason. Settle finds them fascinating. She's evidently a nice person and a fine writer; that's her problem as a travel writer.
The most readable travel writers, like Theroux and Waugh, can dip their pens in acid. Settle gushes. She loves Turkey too much. She admires every ancient building she sees and explains in detail, in very fine language, what is admirable about each mosque, tombs, castle and house. It gets repetitious. She goes into museums and describes their contents at length. She never meets a Turk she doesn't like.
It livens up when she describes some misadventures at the beginning and at the end (and her Turkish bath experience in Istabul) but on the whole it doesn't work as a travel book to be read from beginning to end for entertainment.
Readers will have their own opinions about her accounts of twentieth century Turkish history. That's a touchy subject I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. When it comes to ancient history, she finds Urartians lovable and Hittites hateful and Mother Goddess worship everywhere ( and loves the word "chthonic").

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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