But like much else, Pamuk delivers this with a wink. Nights of Plague leads off with an epigram drawn from War & Peace, as well it might, since it has both a Tolstoyan length and Tolstoyan cast of characters. The Princess Pakize and her consort Nuri Bey become drawn in to the ensuing social and political drama as protagonists. The contented newlyweds push on, but Nuri Bey is recalled to Mingheria when Bonkowski Pasha is murdered.Īttempts to deal with the plague lead, somewhat haphazardly and almost accidentally, to a declaration of independence, which Abdul Hamid can’t do anything about for the Great Powers had blockaded Mingheria to prevent plague from escaping.
They make a pit stop in Mingheria that coincides with the clandestine visit of Nuri Bey’s one-time mentor, “Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation, the renowned chemist and pharmacist Bonkowski Pasha” to deal with the bubonic plague that had recently broken out there. Princess Pakize had been kept under house arrest, along with father and sisters, for almost her entire life until let out just before the three young women were married off. Princess Pakize, “third daughter of the thirty-third Ottoman sultan Murad V” (who had deposed his uncle before being deposed in short order by his half-brother Abdul Hamid), is traveling on a ship bound for China with her new husband, the plague and quarantine expert Nuri Bey, patriarchally yet felicitously chosen for her by her unloved uncle Sultan Abdul Hamid. The novel, one part murder mystery, starts with the Byzantine relationships of the Ottoman ruling family. Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk, Ekin Oklap (trans) (Faber & Faber, September 2022 Knopf, October 2022) This all sounds quite serious, but one can detect the authorial tongue in cheek even in the grimmer parts of the novel.
Set in 1900-that is, both fin-de-siècle and fin d’empire-Mingheria, a largely forgotten (and entirely fictional) Ottoman island province lying between Rhodes and Crete, Nights of Plague tells the story of how the coming of the plague led to a revolution and independence. And Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel Nights of Plague is storytelling so luxuriant that one cannot help but soak in it. It helps to be reminded from time to time that literature, all other objectives aside, is at bottom storytelling.
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