![]() ![]() The story begins in 1901, when a ship from Istanbul lands on Mingheria, where bubonic plague has broken out. …”) And if not for its immersiveness, the book might pass for an exercise in self-reflexive postmodernism. (“I will indulge in a quick digression now. That includes the eastern Mediterranean island of Mingheria, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire that’s findable only on the novel’s own map, and the Google-proof Mina Mingher, the historian who’s writing the book we’re reading, and who claims acquaintance with “the novelist and history enthusiast Orhan Pamuk.” “Nights of Plague” might pass for an old-fashioned, detail-rich Tolstoyan epic - Mingher calls it “both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel” - if not for all those writer-at-work signs. ![]() You could fritter away hours and hours of screen time disentangling what Pamuk has made up from what history has handed him - I speak from experience - but since it already takes hours and hours to read a nearly 700-page novel, what would be the point? As in any work of fiction, we take what’s on the page to be real, whether or not it’s factual. Both the real-life sultan and the imaginary Holmes are weird presences looming over Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “Nights of Plague,” although the sultan stays offstage after setting the story in motion, and characters simply - and repeatedly - evoke Holmes as an exemplar of modern Western rationalism, rather than as a borderline-preposterous literary invention. Not that it matters, since we’re talking about a work of fiction, but Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918), sultan of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, really did love Sherlock Holmes mysteries - and presented Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, with the empire’s Order of the Medjidie when Conan Doyle visited Istanbul in 1907. ![]()
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