Finished reading … When Pera Trees Whisper / Ahmet Umit … 02 Feb.2016
ISBN: 9786051417387
Not a bad story, with multiple plot lines, and well worth reading to see how the whodunit genre is presented in a different culture to my own.
A whodunit with a difference. I bought this book in Istanbul in October 2014 as a souvenir, having stumbled across a very good bookshop and asking did they have any Turkish writers of crime fiction that were available in English translation.
I found it slow-going to start with, especially as I had trouble remembering the Turkish names, completely unfamiliar to me. I didn't know, at first, which characters were male and which female. Does that matter? In this book, yes. While the story was quite modern, the social setting was more old-fashioned – men behaved one way, women another, and each treated accordingly. A bit sexist perhaps but it was nice to see some of the older courtesies that have disappeared from more Western societies.
The story itself has everything: gangs, drugs, guns, prostitution …. generally not scenarios that do much for me. There were street kids, long memories of various ethnic groups being driven out of istanbul, some short lives. Throw love, hate, revenge, land grabs and the Gezi Park resistance into the mix.
The more I read, the more involved I became. As to whodunit? There were a number of murders, all triggered, in one way or another, by the first. The first murder was the last to be solved.
The translator, Elke Dixon, was born and educated in the US before settling in Turkey. The translation was good. But every so often there were odd quirks that you wouldn't expect. For example, “the smell of coal burned my nasal.” Nasal? Nasal passages? Nose? Not a typo because it appeared a couple of times. Quirky, but not off-putting.