Stone and Shadow

Starred review from April 1, 2023
The blood-soaked history of modern Turkey is rendered through the life of Avdo, a tombstone designer who gets caught up in the country's culture and religious wars. A man of muted emotion who never knew his parents and had to survive on the streets, Avdo likes working as well as living in cemeteries for the quiet and solitude they provide. But in 1958, while attempting to help Elif, a girl he has fallen for, escape the clutches of her physically abusive fiance, Mikail Agha, he shoots two armed men and is wounded himself. Convicted of murder, he spends seven years in prison, -dodging execution thanks to a pardon following a military coup. In 1985, his life is upended again by Reyhan, a desperate girl whom he hides from ruthless military officer Cmdr. Cobra, who's hunting her for unstated reasons. Reyhan, it turns out, is the niece of Elif, who, after being forced to wed Mikail, is fatally shot by him years later while again attempting to leave him. Around those two plotlines--two of many in this expansive, dreamy, richly allusive novel--S�nmez contemplates such themes as religious and personal freedom, the sweep of time, fate, and, while making few explicit references to politics, the very meaning of nations. The novel is in constant motion, jumping back and forth among decades from the 1930s to 2000s--and even back to the Ottoman Empire. Turkish Kurdish novelist S�nmez has been compared to magical realists including Borges and Garc�a M�rquez. With this, his fifth work of fiction, he recalls the Rushdie of Midnight's Children in viewing the dispiriting crush of history through the lens of humanity. An enthralling, multidimensional epic from a leading figure on fiction's world stage.

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