“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 7, 2010)

I don’t know why I resisted Orhan Pamuk all of these years, but one thing’s for sure – I now can’t live without him. I remember the critical acclaim that followed Pamuk in 2005 after the release of Snow, but even with a Nobel Prize under his belt, I was hardly swayed. That may have had something to do with my obsessive relationship with Philip Roth during that time – after all, I’m a loyal gal. And this Pamuk guy was not going to take me away from the legendary Zuckermans and Kepeshes of modern Jewish fiction.

This was all before a few months ago when I stumbled across a review of Pamuk’s literary masterpiece, The Museum of Innocence. The premise of the novel immediately had me fixated: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spends the next eight years of his life…sitting in a living room with girl, her husband, and her parents, watching Turkish serials and the evening news, night after night. Now that’s what hooked me: the utter devotion and sacrifice that boy made just to see his beloved, day after day, for eight torturous years, with hardly any affirmation from his object of affection.

Speaking of objects, what Kemal, our love-struck narrator of this brilliant, 560-page novel does manage to do, is become a collector of sorts. Unable to recapture the love of his beautiful, distant-relation, Fusun, (who incidentally marries another man after severing ties with our narrator), Kemal begins to secretly collect items from Fusun, ranging from an earring, to a cigarette butt. And this collection begins to grow into a private, perpetual museum which Kemal cherishes and worships like a Marian shrine.

If I seem evasive, it’s because I don’t wish to give away too much of this melancholy tale of love and obsession in Turkey, circa 1970s. And how could I, anyway? This novel is a grand accomplishment for Pamuk, who allegedly worked on this project for ten years. Filled with images of modern Istanbul, with references to Turkish film, fashion, and soda pop, each page is a tender, nostalgic homage to a city now utterly transformed. Pamuk’s desire to seize these memories go well beyond the confines of his novel: this year, at some undisclosed date, the official Museum of Innocence will open to the Turkish public in the town of Cukurcuma, where much of the story unfolds. Fans of his novel will have an opportunity to visit the museum, and see first-hand, the very objects that Pamuk meticulously records throughout the book. For a sneak peak of these objects, see this slideshow.

As this review comes to an end, I have a confession to make. I can’t get over The Museum of Innocence. I think about it…all the time. It haunts me – like Wong Kar Wai’s similar magnum opus, the movie In the Mood for Love. Filled with lingering reminiscence, clandestine love, and most importantly, an era now vanished, the two works are almost companion pieces. There is something cinematic about Pamuk’s novel that begins on the front dust jacket and ends on the final page. I remember holding this giant of a book for the first time and being completely enthralled by the image before me: a group of young, Turkish adults, in a 1950s convertible car, all smiling. And I knew at that moment that this image was akin to a Lynchian smoke-screen – these were not happy people on a joyride. As you soon discover within the first chapter, the main characters of this novel are tormented but hopeful, destitute but euphoric, all because of a few moments of bliss that forever mark their lives.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Orphan PamukWikipedia page on Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and ExcerptMore on the physical  Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Snow Our 2009 review of The Museum of Innocence And our review of: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (August 2001)
• Snow (August 2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)

“Did it really happen?” I ask. Her smile fades, her lips pressed and thin. “Oh, it happened,” she says, her voice low and alive. “Don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t. It was, it remains, genocide.” The word spills from her mouth.

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 2, 2010)

With the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian deportations only a few years away, author Mark Mustian has set himself a daunting task: to follow his character’s footsteps and to serve as his own gendarme, a guide in the wilderness. For the most part, he succeeds admirably.

As Mr. Mustian writes in the epilogue, “Genocide perhaps represents the ugliest of human deeds, the mass killing of often defenseless fellow beings…Saying it didn’t happen is a mere recipe for recurrence.”

The focus is on one gendarme – a 92-year-old Turkish man named Ahmet Kahn on the verge of senility with a non-operable brain tumor – who suddenly begins memories of events that he has previously denied or purposely forgotten. Side effects of his medication produce extraordinarily vivid dreams that transport him back to exquisitely painful times – to World War I, when he was a gendarme, charged with escorting Armenians across the border from Turkey to Syria. Many died from the grueling march and the lack of proper food and shelter and medicine.

Women, in particular, had a tough time of it: they were frequently used as the playthings of the Turkish men who have grown hard and bored and demand women to do their physical bidding before killing them. One woman captures Ahmet’s attention: her name is Araxie and her eyes are her exotica, one nearly turquoise, one greenish-brown. Ahmet falls head over heals for her, sheltering her from the excesses of the trek that become, for all intents and purposes, a true genocide.

Araxie demands of him, “Why not just shoot us all now? What is it about us you hate so?” And he must answer impotently, “I am only a small piece of the puzzle. I have a job to do. I did not ask for it, nor have I questioned its rationale.” As in books from the past – Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, for example, or the more famous A Separate Peace – Ahmet must eventually realize that his answer is non-satisfactory and that his love for Araxie outweighs the senseless slaughter.

The novel is divided into two portions: the present day, where Emmett Conn suffers through mental disorientation, hospital confinement and the coldness of his grown daughter, and the past, where Ahmet Kahn – same person – struggles to survive amidst swollen corpses, monstrous murders, and clannishness, duplicity, and trickery. As the memories swell in intensity, the reader must ask, “How much of his memory is true and how much is a product of extreme guilt? What happened and what didn’t?”

There are no clear answers. But as Mr. Mustian writes, “The point of the story seemed to be that to think is to forget, to filter from the mind the unnecessary, I have told myself this, repeated it to myself. I have called it our gift from God. This headstrong, heedless survival.” At the end of the day, love does survive…and so do the never relenting memories. Mr. Mustian states in his epilogue, “Decades on, even centuries on, our shared history remains vital…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (September 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mark T. Mustian
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels on the Armenian genocide: The Last Day of the War by Judith Clair Mitchell Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières And another holocaust novel: Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Gendarme (September 2010)

“Now, as she started down the length of the promenade, hope swelled in Yvonne’s chest. Hope that this would be the reward for her trip: she would feel the way she felt during their honeymoon, she would remember every conversation, every joke, every laugh and silence, and the feel of Peter’s thigh, warm from the sun, against hers. She felt she was tracing an unraveled ball of string to its source. They had been so happy at the beginning.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUN 24, 2010)

Vendela Vida’s relatively short novel, The Lovers, packs a big wallop. It is a multi-layered story about Yvonne, a widow, who returns to Turkey where she and her husband once honeymooned. She believes that by returning to the same place where they had been together early in her marriage, she will feel closer to him. Her husband Peter was recently killed in a hit and run car accident in their hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Yvonne has rented a large home, sight unseen, for a couple of weeks until she is scheduled to meet up with her son and daughter and their partners on a boating trip.

Yvonne is an aging woman who is a history teacher. Recently, she has had some troubles in the classroom. For instance, she presented a class about Cromwell twice in the same week. She knows that she is floundering, that her center is gone, but she does not know how to get it back. Perhaps, she thinks, this trip to Turkey will help her.

While in Turkey, odd things happen to her. Yvonne is renting a home that belongs to her landlord’s lover. Ozlem, the wife of Ali, the man from whom she is renting, appears one day and begins a friendship with Yvonne. Ozlem is fraught with her own problems. She is not sure whether she wants to leave Ali and she is violently jealous of Ali’s affair. Ozlem is also pregnant but not sure if Ali is the father.

Yvonne has two children, Aurelia and Matthew. Matthew has been good at everything since she was a child and Aurelia has been a drug addict, in and out of rehab a good many times. This trip they are all planning to take is to be a pre-wedding trip for Matthew;  Yvonne is fearful that some catastrophic event will happen with Aurelia before the trip commences. Aurelia’s drug addiction had caused a lot of friction between Yvonne and Peter during their marriage.

Yvonne likes to drive to the beach. While there, she meets a young boy who sells sea shells. Yvonne strikes up a friendship with him and commissions him to find shells for her. She looks at him as one would a new-found possibility, a friendship or child that is a tabla rasa. She begins to endow him with qualities that he doesn’t really possess but that she needs him to have.

Throughout her time in Turkey, which is fraught with panic, eerie circumstances, and darkness, Yvonne looks back on her marriage and tries to find the truth of what it really was. As she progresses in finding the truth, she becomes first weaker and then gains strength. She realizes that her marriage was not what she thought it was and that she is not really the woman she thought she was in her relationship. She sadly realizes that “these were two of her strengths: changing the subject and feigning ignorance.” She also realizes how very strong her love for her daughter is.

I found the book mesmerizing. The plot alone is enough to carry the book along but the atmospheric suspense makes it even more present and portentous. This book is a sensory experience, at times subtle like watching fish swim in a small pond. At other times, it feels like you are in the eye of the hurricane.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (June 22, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Vendela Vida
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book based on grief with suspense: Stay by Nicola Giffith Read our review of her husband’s book: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Bibliography:

• And Now You Can Go (2003)
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007)
• The Lovers (June 2010)

Non-fiction:

• Girls on the Verge (2000)
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (2000)

“ I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, and, reflecting upon the happy hours Fusun and I had spent there, I would lose myself in daydreams, admiring my slowly growing “collection” with ever renewed wonder. As these objects accumulated, so did the manifest intensity of my love. Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 14, 2009)

“Irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.” One of the characters in The Musuem of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, uses these labels to describe a segment of Istanbul’s young adults. These same descriptors could specifically apply to 30-year-old Kemal, the novel’s protagonist. Kemal, part of Istanbul’s upper class, spends his time managing a portion of the family business. He has the privilege of an education in America and as the novel opens, is about to be engaged to Sibel, the daughter of another wealthy family in the city. It’s slated to be a marriage between equals.

One day, Sibel’s eye catches a designer purse in a local shopping boutique and later, Kemal decides to buy it as a surprise for his soon-to-be fiancée. It is here that he meets 18-year-old Füsun—a distant cousin who will become the obsession of his life. Over the following weeks, the two often meet at an apartment owned by Kemal’s family, which now lies largely abandoned. Füsun gives up her virginity to Kemal and their lovemaking extends over many lazy afternoons. All this time Füsun is torn knowing that she will eventually lose Kemal to Sibel. Nevertheless she hopes the power of their love will be enough for Kemal to stop his upcoming engagement to Sibel.

That doesn’t happen however and Kemal and Sibel get engaged in a lavish ceremony at the Hilton in Istanbul. Istanbul’s crème de la crème attend and Füsun is crushed. At this point, selfishly, Kemal still believes he can have it all—a beautiful wife in Sibel and a mistress on the side.

Having waited long enough for Kemal to come around, however, Füsun decides to call it quits and leaves him hanging. Totally devastated, Kemal ends up breaking off his engagement to Sibel—but this act turns out to be a tad late. When after many months, Kemal does run into Füsun in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods, she is married to a struggling screenwriter Feridun. Now Kemal doesn’t know of any way to stay close to Füsun except by offering to finance one of Feridun’s scripts and in doing so, turning Füsun into a star. Day after day, month after month, for seven years, Kemal visits the Keskin family in their tiny apartment. He shares meals with them and lives on the tiniest slivers of hope that Füsun might some day actually be his.

Over the years, Kemal slowly collects small items that form part of a big collection—these are all items touched by Füsun or connected to her in some way. It is hard to write much more about the story without giving it all away but doing so wouldn’t dilute the fun either. For early on in the story, you can see that this just might turn out to be a modern-day version of Laila-Majnu the story of the ill-fated lovers of Arabia.

The Museum of Innocence is more than just a love story however. In its many layers, it explores various aspects of Turkish life and the country’s history. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has always used his work to showcase a Turkey caught between tradition and Western values. In his earlier novel, Snow, he used the headscarf as a motif for this struggle with change. Here, too, his characters are caught in the tide. Kemal’s young friends all consider themselves “modern” and alcohol flows freely at their parties. They are even beginning to explore intimacy before marriage. Still it is mostly understood that a woman gives up her virginity only to a man she knows for sure, she will marry. This problem haunts Sibel as she decides whether or not to break off her engagement to her straying fiancé. “Sibel knew full well that no matter how high she held her head, no matter how “European” her friends were in their outlook, this affair would not be seen as a love story if we did not marry. It would become the story of a woman whose honor had been stained,” Kemal recounts.

The change that Turkey has to grapple with can be found in the most unexpected places. For example, towards the beginning of the novel, Kemal’s friend Zaim launches a new soda called Meltem. To attract the urban market, he uses a leggy German model to market the product. After a few years though, as the product loses its cachet with the urban rich, Zaim has to rely on a Turkish film actress who can sell the product to the “provincial masses.” This gradual falling out of Meltem to be replaced by Coke and Pepsi is one change that creeps up slowly but is perhaps indicative of the country’s larger struggles with the impact of globalization.

The Museum of Innocence starts off in the early 70s and the political upheaval of the 70s and 80s simmers in the background. That Kemal chooses not to dwell on this discontent too much shows not just how his obsession with Füsun takes precedent over everything else but how a rich kid like him can afford to live comfortably above it all. “I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the Cold War,” Kemal says.

As the story begins, as Kemal goes out with both Sibel and Füsun, he emerges as a selfish and vain person, someone the reader cannot immediately empathize with. Even at his engagement party, Kemal looks forward to “partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl—all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price.” It is to Pamuk’s credit that as the story goes on, Kemal matures into a tragic character, someone the reader can feel sorry for.

Pamuk’s new novel describes many of the neighborhoods—Beyoglu, Taksim, Tophane, Fatih, Edirnekapi—he visits in his wonderful non-fiction work, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Especially as Kemal visits with the Keskin family night after night for dinner, he makes his way around Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods and Pamuk beautifully describes these.

Pamuk has always been a fan of well-honed literary devices and here he narrates Kemal’s story through the individual items in his collection of everyday objects stored at the Museum of Innocence. Many a chapter ends with the cataloging of seemingly mundane objects—which nevertheless have some resonance for Kemal. “I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day,” Pamuk writes in one such instance.

These objects are as disparate as they can get but they are all bound by one unifying thread—they are all touched by Füsun or somehow associated with her. A quince grater, a vast collection of cigarette stubs, a lost earring, a ticket to a movie—together they paint a complete set of memories for the lovelorn Kemal. This endless cataloging of objects can start to wear down on the reader occasionally but Pamuk is skilful enough to know just when to accelerate the pace a tad. Besides, one realizes, love is full of mundane moments mixed in with the sublime.

As Kemal spends endless hours in the Merhamet Apartments with his collection, wallowing in his memories, it becomes obvious that while the objects offer him some measure of relief, they also stifle him in many ways. After all, no collection of objects can really substitute for the warm touch of a loved one. Kemal seeks solace from the fact that even if they might not be the real thing, from their association with his lover, they are enough to offer some kind of daily sustenance.

The Museum of Innocence reminds us that unlike love, which can be ephemeral, objects can be more easily possessed. And, when all else fails, the memories they evoke can be enough to last an anguished lifetime. (Translated by Maureen Freely.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (October 20, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website for Orhan Pamuk Wikipedia on Orhan Pamuk Nobel Literature Prize
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Official site for The Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Snow Read another review of The Museum of Innocence And our review of: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (August 2001)
• Snow (August 2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (June 2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (September 2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (November 2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)

“A man who has never had an unforgettable woman in his life has not lived, but merely existed on this earth.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (NOV 4, 2009)

In the delightful, genre defying novel, Many and Many a Year Ago, from Turkish author, Selcuk Altun, Kemal Kuray is the son of the Assistant Cemetery Director–a former sergeant-major who played the tuba in the local air force band. Kemal’s father’s unfulfilled ambitions spill onto his son, and Kemal grows up with the indoctrination that there is “no calling more noble than that of a fighter pilot.” In time, Kemal, forbidden to play with the other children in the neighbourhood, grows up “studious and disciplined,” winning a scholarship to boarding school and eventually accepted into the Turkish Air Force Academy. Graduating with the rank of Lieutenant, Kemal begins flying an F-16 and as a hotshot pilot he is slated to become the “future commander of the Air Force.” A plane crash leaves Kemal injured, depressed and grounded, and his promising career is over before it really began.

Back at Air Force headquarters, Kemal is assigned to a translation project. Here he meets a “mysterious” young man named Suat Altan, and they patch together a relationship of sorts. In time Suat goes his own way while Kemal flounders in the Air Force, too depressed and nervous to fly, and yet not resigned to a life time at a desk job.

Some time later, Kemal is contacted by Suat’s twin brother, Fuat. Fuat tells Kemal a strange story. Suat, now a very wealthy man, but increasingly isolated from the world, and obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe has simply disappeared following the death of his fiancée. Suat has left Kemal a legacy– an apartment in Balat, and the sum of $2.4 million to be disbursed monthly. Kemal’s luck seems to be changing once more, and he resigns from the Air Force and moves to his new apartment in Balat.

What follows is a delightful, playful tale, part mystery, part detective novel, and part literary thriller as Kemal embarks on several “Anatolian wild goose chases.” Kemal, who’s having some problems adjusting to civilian life, finds himself becoming an amateur detective as he looks first for a lost heir and then a lost woman. He travels into the remote regions of Turkey, to the glamorous mystery of Buenos Aires, and eventually to the Baltimore grave of Edgar Allen Poe. Along the way, he encounters many characters who all have their own stories to tell, and some of these stories are various versions of the same events.

Many and Many a Year Ago is a clever, complex puzzle that cannot be read in a hurry but should be absorbed slowly. Nothing is quite what is seems, and the story layers and mysteries form a tableaux of information that all lead to Suat’s obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. In terms of content, Many and Many a Year Ago reminds me of the wonderful novels of Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo. Indeed, Verissimo’s novel Borges and the Eternal Orangutans revolves around an international meeting of Edgar Allen Poe experts. Altun’s novel, however, with its tales within tales, is also reminiscent of the delights of One Thousand and One Nights.

Turkish author Selcuk Altun published his first novel in 2001 at the age of 51. Altun’s fourth novel, and the first to be translated into English is Songs My Mother Never Taught Me. In a highly unusual move, Altun paid for the translation himself, and the novel was subsequently published by U.K. Telegram Books in 2008. Telegram Books then translated and published Many and Many a Year Ago in 2009.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Telegram Books (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AMAZON PAGE:	Many and Many a Year Ago
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Selcuk Altun
EXTRAS:	Review of Many and Many a Year Ago Complete Review of Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Turkish author: Orhan Pamuk This book reminds of these authors: Paul Auster Luis Fernando Verissimo

Partial Bibliography:

• Loneliness Comes from the Road You Go Down (2001; not yet translated)
• Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (2007; June 2008 in English)
• Many and Many a Year Ago (2008; September 2009 in English)

“That’s how it is, isn’t it? If you’re going to die, you might as well live. Death on a full belly is better than a life of hunger.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Beth Chariton (AUG 10, 2009)

If you become numb to the conflict of constant war, does it prevent you from dealing with your own personal battles? In The Last War, by Ana Menéndez, Flash and Brando get paid to travel and document war – he the “Wonderboy” journalist, she the photographer/wife that follows in his shadow.

Brando travels to Baghdad, while Flash stays behind in Istanbul, waiting for photography equipment, travel papers, or any other excuse she can find to avoid joining him. He calls her from Baghdad, sometimes twice a day, from the rooftop of the mansion he’s staying in, while she answers from their four-bedroom apartment with the fabulous view. Their type of reporting allows them to live several classes higher than their means, and all on Brando’s company’s bill.

Any intimacy between them has slowly diminished from exposure to war, human hatred and revenge. They get by on small amounts of surface dialogue, the war too devastating to discuss out loud or often, and daily topics of conversation too trivial compared to the surrounding destruction.

At first, Flash enjoys her time alone, glad for the break from their strained marriage. While Brando waits patiently for her arrival in Baghdad, she continues to accept small freelance jobs and visits her list of desired tourist destinations in Istanbul.

After two weeks, Flash receives a letter stating the Brando is having an affair in Baghdad, and Flash’s inner battle begins – the constant, internal dialogue, the nagging pre-occupation with not knowing the truth. She starts to wonder if she ever loved him, and if he truly missed her or just the fact that she follows behind him. Consumed by doubt and resentment, she searches his office, looking for clues. She struggles with insecurity, realizing how much time she’s spent in their marriage waiting around for him to return from assignments. Rather than confront him by phone, she tells herself she’s waiting to see him in person, to see his face when she asks. He senses through their phone conversations that something isn’t quite right, and now, he’ll be the one waiting for her.

In the days following the arrival of the letter, she wanders aimlessly through the city, obsessing about the letter and the supposed sender, Mira. Feelings of insecurity, paranoia and inferiority overwhelm her, depleting her concentration and preventing her from working.

Then Flash realizes she’s being followed by a mysterious woman in a black abaya, and that she’s seen her a number of times in her daily travels. The woman finally reveals herself outside Flash’s apartment, and she instantly remembers Alexandra from their previous travels in Afghanistan. She continues to show up unexpectedly and uninvited, and her beauty and charisma make Flash feel awkward and self-conscious. Flash is suspicious of her constant presence, and wonders if Alexandra has anything to do with the letter. But Alexandra denies having anything to do with it, and her reaction is cool, calm, and unsympathetic.

Insomnia and migraines take over, and Flash paces through the nights while her upstairs neighbors argue violently, screaming and dragging furniture across their floor. Unable to decide whether she should return to the States, or join her husband in Iraq, exhaustion takes her on a downward emotional spiral of packing and unpacking the new suitcase she purchases in the marketplace. It’s no longer clear to her where her true home is.

Alexandra’s presence stirs up many restless memories for Flash. Night and day she’s consumed with flashbacks to her time in Afghanistan with Brando, Alexandra, and Alexandra’s boyfriend, Amir. Then Alexandra’s lonely, insecure side is exposed at a party they attend together, and Flash relaxes around her, feeling a mutual empathy for their situations. But it’s the last she’ll see of Alexandra in Istanbul. A week later, she sends Flash an e-mail, saying she’s leaving on a flight for Amman.

An unexpected tragedy forces Flash to realize that her self-righteous martyrdom has conveniently distracted her from her own shortcomings, leaving her a self-made victim. Four years later, Flash runs into Alexandra, who confesses the real reason she pursued Flash in Istanbul. Relishing the moment, she finally exposes the truth to Flash about the hurtful betrayal they had ignored all along. Now both women would have to deal with their own sordid pasts in order to get on with their lives.

Maybe it’s Flash who figuratively threw the first bomb, or shot the first bullet on the battlefield of her marriage. But who would be the first to wave the white flag? Universal or personal, there are no winners when any war ends, and the true enemy is sadly revealed after the damage has been done.

This novel is well written, and just the right length. Ana Menéndez does a wonderful job of bringing the character’s humanity to the page. Written in first person, the author places us right in Flash’s psyche, along with her anxieties, insecurities and their extreme accompanying emotions. The intricately layered themes of war and conflict on all levels are something that every reader will relate to while reading this story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; 1 edition (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Beth Chariton
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ana Menendez
EXTRAS:	An earlier interview with Ana Menedez (2001)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More war torn stories:The Distance Between Us by Masha Hamilton Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward Certainty by Madeline Thien More by Ana Menendez: Adios, Happy Homeland

Bibliography:

• In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd (2001)
• Loving Che (2003)
• The Last War (May 2009)
• Adios, Happy Homeland (August 2011)