Nights of Plague

The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.

While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes many satirical shots at nationalism and nationhood, employing as a punchline the fictional island nation of Mingheria at a time when nation states were becoming a way of politically understanding territory in many parts of the world.

Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk and faithfully translated by Ekin Oklap, transports us more than a century into the past, to a country that never existed but one that feels every bit as real as the Ottoman Empire. Pamuk manages this by giving his invented history the pacing and vocabulary of a nineteenth-century novel, full of old-fashioned etiquette, dungeons, sudden reversals, and plenty of Romance. Even though this book could be read as a recreation of hundred-plus-year-old epic novels à la Dickens or Tolstoy, one doesn’t have to look very hard to see the parallels to our present. The over-arcing plot of this novel shows us a country faced with a lethal plague, a population reluctant to take precautions, and a headlong tumble into nationalism...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.