The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, June 24, 2023

Byblos: Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague is the fattest book I’ve read in the past few months (non-fiction bricks aside, Mann’s Buddenbrooks held the title for a while, after my third and not-last reading of The Magic Mountain, that wonderful adventure novel that doesn’t leave the halls and rooms of a Davos sanatorium). Nights is set in the dying days of the four-century-long Ottoman Empire, on the Cyprus-like fictional island of Mingheria in the non-fictional sublimities of the eastern Mediterranean, shimmer of my youth (and not to be confused with the equally non-fictional Mingrelia, the small Black Sea province in eastern Georgia–Stalin’s birthplace, not Sherman’s trods). Bubonic plague has broken out on Mingheria. Pamuk had written more than half the novel, including its plagued premise, before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, adding a degree of verisimilitude–a word I cannot help spelling as versimilitude–in reverse: fiction is often closer to the truth than mere fact, when told by truth-sayers like Pamuk. The novel is also a love story, a palace intrigue, a romance of revolution, a girl’s Odyssean search for one’s father, a history of the rotting empire, a crime thriller. It begins with the murder of a physician who goes to the island to investigate the plague and runs into the likes of people our own Stephen Bickel and Bob Snyder, our health department’s covid-slayers, ran into the first year of the plague. Some of the goons wanted them dead. And of course it’s a history of the psychology of a people besieged by a pandemic. The book’s first third is difficult to put down. Its middle third sags and gets lost in too many baked goods, including the literal clue to assassinations getting lost in a mound of bread rolls. The third third picks up again, though still laboring to bring an unfinished carpet’s worth of threads together into a bokhara whole. I’m not sure it’s Pamuk’s strongest novel, though he undoubtedly designed it as such. Snow and The Museum of Innocence are taut wonders of forceful observations, of nostalgic languour and the sort of enigmas that melt even the harshest dogmatists among us, and I have yet to read My Name Is Red, his supposed masterpiece. I wonder what readers would have made of an Ottoman epic set in a Mediterranean fiction of plagues had the book not had the fortune of Covid’s concurrence. Time, or maybe a second reading, may tell. I read it in French, because I couldn’t wait for the American translation to reach these shores, and wasn’t convinced our Ladapo and DeSantis duo would not have found a way to include Nights of Plague on their ban list (as I am sure it is as far as schools and New College are concerned). Maybe reading the American version will give me a deeper understanding. I have reached the age when, by combination of senility and glimmers of finally emerging wisdom near a trippel’s tail end, I have learned that reading a book just once–a good book, that is–is really like skimming a preface. The magic is in re-reading, a form of metempsychosis of the here and now that transforms both book and reader into new beings, sparing us death as the way there. For now, I can say this: I am grateful I read Nights of Plague, it obviously is not letting go, it shimmers still, and that is a lot to say, relieving me of any guilt when I say: you may labor, but you won’t regret, reading this book too. It is no Underworld.

—P.T.

Flagler Beach Webcam:

As soon as this magnificent image—which Homer described in the Iliad as “an emerald built of pink stone”—appeared on the horizon, ship captains of a finer spiritual disposition would invite their passengers on deck so that they could savor the views, and artists on their way to the East would avidly paint the romantic vista, adding black storm clouds for effect.

But few of these ships would stop at Mingheria, for in those days there were only three ferries that made regular weekly trips to the island: the Messageries Maritimes Saghalien (whose high-pitched whistle everyone in Arkaz recognized) and Equateur (with its deeper horn), and the Cretian company Pantaleon’s dainty vessel the Zeus (which only rarely sounded its horn, and always in brief bursts). So the fact that an unscheduled ferry was approaching the island of Mingheria two hours before midnight on the twenty- second of April 1901—the day our story begins—signaled that something unusual was afoot.

The ship with pointed bow and slender white chimneys closing in on the island from the north, stealthy as a spy vessel, and bearing the Ottoman flag, was the Aziziye. It had been tasked by Sultan Abdul Hamid II with transporting a distinguished Ottoman delegation from Istanbul on a special mission to China. To this delegation of seventeen fez-, turban-, and hat-clad religious scholars, army officers, translators, and bureaucrats, Abdul Hamid had added at the last moment his niece Princess Pakize, whose marriage he had recently arranged, and her husband, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey. The joyous, eager, and slightly dazed newlyweds had not been able to fathom the reason for their inclusion in the delegation to China, and had puzzled over the matter at great length.

–From Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2021, American Translation, 2022).

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