![]() ![]() ![]() De Bernières also takes the reader to the battlefields of various wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, and portrays the Battle of Gallipoli from the Turkish point of view - although I don't think he captures the true extent of the horrors of Gallipoli.ĭe Bernières' dedicates his novel to: ".the unhappy memory of the millions of civilians on all sides during the times portrayed, who had become victims of the numerous death marches, movements of refugees, campaigns of persecution and extermination, and exchanges of population." The destruction of the Ottoman empire in WWI put an end to a tradition of religious and ethnic tolerance in Asia Minor, areas of the Balkans, and many Arab countries. Refugees fled in droves into the Ottoman Empire, to life in exile, trying to escape the killing fields. Similar ethnic and religious mass murders occurred in the Balkans, and other such slaughters were perpetrated by the Russians in their vast territory. Birds Without Wings is superb historical fiction which chronicles the rise of Turkish nationalism, following the horrific massacres of Armenians and Muslims in the 19th and early 20th century. ![]() Louis de Bernières intertwines his beautiful narrative of a small Anatolian town and the lives of its inhabitants with that of the biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first president of the Turkish Republic. "Man is a bird without wings, and a bird is a man without sorrow." ![]() Over to read a review of A Partisan's Daughter) ![]()
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