#WhereAreYouMonday
Mesopotamia 631 BC
London 1840
Turkey 2014
How else could I experience theses places in these times if it weren‘t for stories? How bereft my life would be without books. How thankful I am to be a reader!
@Cupcake12
pickAnother beautifully written novel by Elif Shafak. Humanity is united by water as this story illustrates in the telling of Arthur who lives near the River Thames in the 1840s, Narin who lives by the River Tigris in 2014, Zaleekhah who lives in a houseboat on the River Thames in 2018.
pickI loved this one. It‘s about how one drop of water can connect us. It‘s told via the unique voices of three people. Arthur who born very near the Thames, Narin who lives near the Tigris and Zaleekah who is renting a houseboat on the Thames. Beautifully written and very moving at times, I was very immersed in these characters‘ lives and found it a page turner.
A library book. I loved The Island of Missing Trees by this author so looking forward to this one.
so-soOverall I enjoy the story, and I have to confess I didn't know anything about the Cyprus civil war and it was really interesting, I'm sure I'll look more into it. Despite loving magic realism and the way Shafak writes, I often found the parts told from the fig tree's point of view quite boring and I felt myself disconnecting and having to re-read them sometimes. I didn't mind the parts of the fig tree when they were relevant to the story, it was⬇️
pickAs I get older I find I‘ve been wandering further from new or popular fiction and diving deep into translations and older literature as so much is relevant to our current age or forces me to look at the world through a new lens. This book, a novella combined with a collection of short stories, looks at the history and continued violence in a small mountain community in Turkey and how easy it is to be overlooked by the rest of the country.
so-soQuite hard going and very convoluted descriptions. You can see how with a bit of refinement it could have been great. Don‘t pick it up for a comfort read 🙂
