Birds Without Wings: Meeting Notes by BB

As eight of us gathered to discuss Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, Lily, the hostess's fluffy white lapdog, greeted us at the door barking.  She calmed down after sniffing doggy treats in the pocket of one of our members and spent the rest of the evening begging and eating.  

De Bernieres is author also of Corelli’s Mandolin, which we read and discussed a few years ago.  In Birds, we found considerable difference between the sections on historical events and personages and those on the fictional characters in a fictional village. The former were so filled with facts we didn’t try to remember them all.  The latter were poignant and often comical.  

We decided that this is primarily an anti-war book as is borne out in the dedication:  “In the grand scheme of things, this book is necessarily dedicated to the unhappy memory of the millions of civilians on all sides during the times portrayed, who became victims of the numerous death marches, movements of refugees, campaigns of persecution and extermination, and exchanges of population.”

 Those of us sided completely with the Armenians, Greeks and Jews after our group read Snow by  Orhan Pamuk now found our sympathies extending to include Islamists and, indeed, all the many peoples in the area who were in turn victims and victimizers. 

 In its descriptions of war, this novel is as gory as anything we’ve ever read and, in its various expressions of love, as lyrically tender.  We were particularly struck by the author’s depiction of women’s feelings.

Members compared this book to Don Quixote for its wise-cracking, philosophical folly and exaggeration and to War and Peace for its juxtaposition of world affairs and domesticity.

One member wondered at how the author, an Englishman, could know so intimately the ins and outs of daily life in his mixed-ethnic fictional village.  Perhaps the answer can be discerned in the acknowledgements in the back of the hardback edition in which the author thanks both Turkish diplomats who made “a huge stack of British Foreign Office records” available to him and also acknowledges fifteen individuals from two bookstore owners to a priest to a cook to a coppersmith.

One of our members brought to our attention “Letter from Turkey: The Deep State” in the March 12 issue of The New Yorker.   

Two of our members have visited Istanbul and were struck by the many layers of history all in one place and by the clash of East and West--women wearing bright, tight jeans and high heels, for instance, along with decorative head coverings.  We talked about the displacement of American Indians and about official narratives persuading us to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amidst a rich, wide-ranging conversation, only Lily kept her focus on one thing and one thing only.