The fourth protagonist is a fig tree ( sic) acting as a wise and sad narrator with a human voice that may be, the re-incarnation of Ada’s mother (a clever trick, even though the magical realism of a speaking tree that understands mice and mosquitos doesn’t quite work). Eventually both end up as emigrees in London with a daughter who is a third protagonist, all irrevocably altered by civil strife on the island they left behind. They are caught up in the tribal events following the violent partition of Cyprus in 1974 into Greek and Turkish regions along what is still known as the “Green Line” (which persists today, guarded by UN troops), with old, friendly neighbors turning into blood-thirsty enemies leading to civil war and mass displacement of refugees.
#TINCTURE A WEIRD WEST TRILOGY FULL#
The primary narrative, full of pathos that sometimes turns into bathos, is the doomed love story between a young Muslim Turkish-Cypriot girl, later to become an archeologist digging up and identifying skeletons from the civil war, and a gentle Greek-Cypriot boy who turns into a botanist. Historical novel by a British-Turkish writer, concerned with personal trauma, intergenerational pattern of suppression of inter- and intra-community violence, recovery and suffering in the natural world, in particular the life of trees, insects, and birds. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (2021) ***
To better follow the novel, I found it helpful to consult the superb The Complete Paintings of Bruegel illustrated tome by Taschen. What is striking is the dissociation between this violent historic backdrop and the serene nature of the depictions, illustrating a history-less land in a history-less year. You learn a lot about the tumultuous times (in the 1560s) during which Bruegel painted these, of bloody and ruthless Spanish rule of Holland and the Inquisition that finally erupted into the Dutch throwing off the Spanish yoke.
It is supposedly a 6 th, previously unknown, painting in Bruegel’s famous cycle of five paintings of the year, of which Hunters in the Snow is the best known one, standing in for the archetypical depiction of a European winter. Witty thriller (I often burst out laughing) by the British playwright of a philosopher who thinks he has discovered a previously unknown painting of Pieter Bruegel’s in the manor of his dim-witted, venal and undeserving neighbor in the English countryside, and his machinations to acquire it.
#TINCTURE A WEIRD WEST TRILOGY SERIES#
In a series of heavily fictionalized flashbacks, the novel traces the book from its inception in Spain in the 14 th century, through 500 years of bloody and violent European history, antisemite pogroms, and persecution by the Holy Inquisition all the way through World War II and the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s, where the manuscript is now on display in a museum in Sarajevo.
Read in 2022 People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (2008) ***Įngaging novel concerned with the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish book of prayer for Passover. Books that I particularly enjoyed or that express a point of view particularly well are awarded three to five stars. By-and-large, these are books I like otherwise I wouldn’t have finished them. Chronologically arranged list of interesting books – science, philosophy, novels, whatever – I’ve read.