The West in Her Eyes
Summer 1918: twenty-year-old Esther’s dream of studying the piano at the conservatory in St. Petersburg, 2000 miles from her family’s home in Baku by the Caspian Sea, is disrupted by the civil war. The family, rich from oil proceeds, has to flee the country to escape certain death by the Bolsheviks.
The family stops for a while in Teheran, and Esther meets two people who change her life forever. One is Anahid, a young woman who had been taken from her home in Anatolia and forced to become one of the wives in Mirza Khan’s harem. In Teheran, Esther is also befriended by a Turk, Captain Kemal, who takes an interest in her story and offers to help the family across the rough terrain to Constantinople. He asks Esther to marry him, explaining that the tribal chiefs of the hostile land they will have to travel through will show more respect and leniency if Kemal is travelling with his wife and her family.
The story extends from Russia through Anatolia, Persia and ultimately France. At every step the reader is there: walking in the characters’ boots, smelling the fragrances and odours, touching the silk and the shit, hearing the song and the screams, seeing the exotic colours and the depressing drabness, and feeling the ecstasy of passion and the emptiness of hunger and despair.
The different loves that are threaded throughout the story—of individuals, family, and country—are those that lead to unbreakable bonds and enormous sacrifices but also unimaginable cruelty. The writing is exquisite, the descriptions of character, place and emotion are sublime, and I can promise you that this book will stay with you in head and heart for a very long time. Highly recommended.
