{"id":68288,"date":"2017-09-28T07:38:19","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T05:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viaggiointurchia.com\/it\/?p=68288"},"modified":"2017-09-28T07:38:19","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T05:38:19","slug":"i-libri-su-istanbul-la-citta-ai-confini-del-cielo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viaggiointurchia.com\/it\/i-libri-su-istanbul-la-citta-ai-confini-del-cielo\/","title":{"rendered":"I libri su Istanbul, La citt\u00e0 ai confini del cielo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Articolo per\u00a0<em>TimeOut Istanbul<\/em>. Il libro di\u00a0<strong>Elif \u015eafak<\/strong>, \u00e8 stato gi\u00e0 tradotto in italiano dalla versione in turco: ed \u00e8 uscito per Rizzoli col titolo\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rizzoli.eu\/libri\/la-citta-ai-confini-del-cielo\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><em>La citt\u00e0 ai confini del cielo<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<strong>\u00a0Il mio giudizio per\u00f2 non \u00e8 del tutto positivo<\/strong>: \u00e8 piacevole da leggere, ma la trama \u00e8 dispersiva; ci sono episodi incomprensibili, come il viaggio a Roma che per\u00f2 \u2013 nel suo itinerario, dico \u2013 non viene raccontato.\u00a0<strong>Mi convince molto la descrizione di Istanbul come citt\u00e0 cosmopolita<\/strong>, al di l\u00e0 degli stereotipi: profondit\u00e0 storica, rilevanza contemporanea.<\/p>\n<p><i>The Architect\u2019s Apprentice\u00a0<\/i>(Viking, 2014) is the ninth novel by Elif \u015eafak, one of the most read and celebrated \u2013 internationally as well \u2013 of the new generation of Turkish authors (she was born in 1971). It was written first in English like\u00a0<i>The Bastard of Istanbul\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0<i>The Forty Rules of Love<\/i>, so it is not a translation even though it was published one year before in Turkey, as\u00a0<i>Ustam ve Ben\u00a0<\/i>(<i>My Master and I<\/i>).<\/p>\n<p>It is a very hybrid and complex novel of 455 pages in which different genres coexist and inter-mingle. It is first and foremost a\u201dnovel of formation\u201d, that of the 12-year-old Jahan who comes to Istanbul from India to bring a white elephant \u2013 Chota \u2013 as a gift to Sultan S\u00fcleyman. He enters the Palace to steal jewels as ordered by Captain Gareth, but he becomes instead the official elephant-keeper at Topkap\u0131\u2019s menagerie (\u201c<i>while full of ferocious creatures, it was, all in all, no wilder than the city outside<\/i>\u201d). He\u00a0meets the Chief Royal Architect Mimar Sinan on the battlefield and is then chosen as one of his apprentices. \u201c<i>There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together. Mosques, bridges, madrasas, caravanserais, alms houses, aqueducts\u2026<\/i>\u201d, Jahan writes in a final letter summing up his life.<\/p>\n<p>And so the novel recounts how the most magnificent monuments and marvels of engineering of the Ottoman classical era \u2013 \u015eehzade Camii, S\u00fcleymaniye Camii, the new system of aqueducts and reservoirs \u2013 came to light. Elif \u015eafak details in a very vivid way the techniques employed, the relentless efforts of masons and carpenters, the genius and knowledge of Sinan founded in the three \u201cfountains of wisdom\u201d (books, work, and roads\/travel), the influences of the Italian Renaissance that had rediscovered the lessons of the Roman architect Vitruvius (\u201cf<i>orza, utilit\u00e0, bellezza<\/i>\u201d; strength, use, beauty). The chief architect even sends his favourite apprentice to Roma to meet Michelangelo. \u201c<i>Things are written in water over there, except the works of my master, which are written in stone\u201d,<\/i>\u00a0Jahan thinks of Sinan\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n<p>But\u00a0<i>The Architect\u2019s Apprentice\u00a0<\/i>is also a love story: an impossible and never fulfilled love story, that of Jahan and Mihrimah Sultan (the daughter of S\u00fcleyman and H\u00fcrrem\/Roxelana) for whom he designs the beautiful mosque on the Bosphorus in \u00dcsk\u00fcdar and whom he loves until the end of his life (\u201c<i>She is the shadow that follows me everywhere, towering above me when I feel low, draining the light from my soul<\/i>\u201d). It is a fable, full of enchantments and spells, of eunuchs and seductive oriental pleasures. It is a detective novel, full of intrigues, extremisms and savage violence, fights for raw power,\u00a0<i>coups de th\u00e9\u00e2tre<\/i>, treacheries. It is a picaresque novel, in which Jahan\u00a0shifts continuously from the privileged Palace to taverns and prisons; amazing and\u00a0exhilarating adventures take place whenever he happens to meet \u2013 that is, quite often \u2013 a tribe of gypsies he befriends (even Chota gets drunk with\u00a0<i>rak\u0131<\/i>). But even if the characters are sketched with verve and the pace of the narration is pleasantly energetic, after a very brilliant and promising beginning the plot gets excessively fragmented and the developments are hard to follow (the reader\u2019s focus is diverted by many brief and inconsequential episodes, unrelated to the main story).<\/p>\n<p>Elif \u015eafak\u2019s book is ultimately a novel of Istanbul:\u00a0\u201c<i>[a] city so vast she expanded left and right, and up towards the firmament, striving to ascend, desiring more, never satisfied.<\/i>\u201d The Ottoman capital lives in front of the reader, depicted not superficially but in its true variegated, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural essence: mosques, churches, and synagogues side by side; Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and Levantines and many other groups keeping their traditions and their dignity intact. It teems with outcasts living at the margins of society, some of them physically living in shanty-towns from time to time destroyed to make place to public buildings; Jahan is pushed to reflect on the role of the architect as someone \u2013 as the writer suggests \u2013 who must assure \u201c<i>the protection of the past from its future<\/i>\u201d (yes, it is a not-so-veiled critique of the present construction frenzy in Istanbul and its costs). In the end, the Indian elephant-keeper turned apprentice is cheated out of his rightful place as the new Chief Royal Architect and leaves the empire: he then travels the world and \u2013 as old as master Sinan, who had died at 99 \u2013 goes to Agra to build the Taj Mahal for another Jahan, the Mughal emperor. A (fictional) piece of Istanbul in India.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Articolo per\u00a0TimeOut Istanbul. Il libro di\u00a0Elif \u015eafak, \u00e8 stato gi\u00e0 tradotto in italiano dalla versione in turco: ed \u00e8 uscito per Rizzoli col titolo\u00a0La citt\u00e0 ai confini del cielo.\u00a0Il mio giudizio per\u00f2 non \u00e8 del tutto positivo: \u00e8 piacevole da leggere, ma la trama \u00e8 dispersiva; ci sono episodi incomprensibili, come il viaggio a Roma [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":68289,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,50],"tags":[192,181,193,190,183,191,51],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>i libri su Istanbul la citt\u00e0 ai confini col cielo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I libri su Istanbul: La citt\u00e0 ai confini del cielo di Elif Safak\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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