The Birds Have Also Gone - Yaşar Kemal

"There is an ancient Turkish tradition that promises the person who

frees a small bird a place in paradise. Three boys set up a business of catching birds to enable people to free them, but city people are now sceptical and tragedy lies in wait for the boys."

Only about 150 pages, this was a short but impactful read. The second of my books set in Istanbul, it gave a brilliant yet ephemeral look into the culture. The writing style and descriptive passages are stunning, even if some of the content was brutal and thought provoking. I was disturbed by the tradition of freeing birds, captured for only this reason, that would then be released by a well meaning if deluded person only to be caught again. Trapped in this horrible cycle of capture and release.  

The characters of the boys are equally as unpin down-able as the rest of the story. They are, like many others in the book, disturbed by the fact people no longer want to buy the birds and partake. They take this failing to signify the moral failings of the modern Istanbul and the lack of faith in it's people. They also seem to feel pity for the many tiny beautiful birds they stuff into cages far to small for them, killing many birds everyday. Whether this pity is real or just a selling tactic though is truly hard to make out. The boys don't seem to understand how horrible their actions are, and put all of the blame for the birds captures and deaths at the door of the people who won't buy the birds freedom. 

This was my first Kemal and it did not disappoint. The book is so many things in one: a celebration of a great city, half reality and more than half myth; a lament for passing traditions and a disappearing way of life; a bewildered exclamation against the ravages of modernity, which has brought in its wake so much grief to so many. 

Above all else, this is an environmental story, and the author marvels at the gifts of nature so prodigiously showered on the Bosphorus, so cruelly treated by ambivalent and blinkered custom. The ending is truly shocking - but could it really have been any other way?

Age Rating 14+. Deeply moving, quite shocking and sad.