The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 August 2005
by Buket Uzuner
Afife Piri is a young Turkish woman who has excelled in school and other intellectual and creative pursuits. She has been called to an unnamed city in a Scandanavian country, along with eighty-seven other creative personalities from around the world. Ostensibly, these special select students are gathered to work together in an isolated and productive environment, where they can share each other's knowledge and create who knows what great things as a result of their collaborations. At first, this UN-sponsored gathering looks exciting to Afife. She meets unique personalities. Seminars are organized. And it quickly becomes apparent that what these people really excel in is just being superior and different from all the normal people by whom they've been plagued all their inspired lives. The characters look petulant and self-absorbed, but their uniqueness suddenly looks like it is poorly valued by the world at large. Soon, there are sinister implications to their gathering and soon, they're looking for plans of escape. The book is definitely odd, with a strong streak of the surreal running through it. Afife is presented with one peculiar event after another, and she seems almost willfully out of touch with what is going on. She has romantic feelings, but everybody has a non-standard view of romance and morality. Her main affection is a man who claims to be the obscure Russian-born author Romain Gary. His is a powerful and hypnotic personality. All the other characters are descendents of famously creative iconoclasts, from Joan of Arc to Anaïs Nin to Galileo to Nehru. Their ancestry is their source of intellectual power (though, the descendents of real creative geniuses aren't often as great as their ancestors). The UN plot to normalize these geniuses is eventually exposed, and they escape to nothing less than a kind of Shangri-la for genius exiles. This, in the end, is far too bizarre and convenient an escape, and the author may have missed a chance to make a stronger statement here about genius vs. the majority of mediocrity. It's a pretty weird book, which takes a long time to get to its point. On the one hand, it reminds of Pirandello, on the other, the labyrinths of Borges. But it doesn't reach the brilliance of either.