Serenade for Nadia by Zulfu Livaneli;
translated from Turkish by Brendan Freely 416 pages
From
one of Turkey’s bestselling authors, Zulfu Livaneli (don’t feel bad, I had never heard of
him before either), comes a novel of an extraordinary love story mingled with a
forgotten real-life tragedy intermingled with a spy-like thriller that is hard
to put down. It’s a story-within a story-within a story that is virtually seamless
for the reader. If you enjoyed the complexity of Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind
Assassin,” I think you will geek-out with this novel.
Story One takes place on a plane in 2001. (Nothing to do with
9/11.) Maya Duran is headed from Istanbul to Boston to visit a professor that
she in charge of escorting when he came to Istanbul University. While her
plane-mates are sleeping, Maya wants to
get the story she just lived down in writing. This part is not long and is interspersed
through Story Two.
Story Two finds Maya, a single mom who has a demanding job at
Istanbul University with a teenage sone who spends more tiem on his computer
that he does anything else. Maya has
been selected to shepherd Professor Maximilan Wagner, now an elderly “German-born
Harvard professor” who has come to lecture at Istanbul University. He brought with him one a bag and a violin.
It has been fifty-nine years since Maximilan has been to
Istanbul, not since the death of his wife in 1942, aboard the “Struma,” a shocking
tragedy that “led to the death of nearly 800 refugees fleeing the Holocaust”
for Palenstine. Max has one other reason
for making the trip from Boston…he wants to play once more at the place he last
saw his wife. However, when a white Renault begins to shadow them, Maya becomes
nervous and starts to research Maximilan. She enlists the aid of her son, whose
computer skills are invaluable. The
scene of Maximilan playing one last time for his Nadia is nothing short of heartbreaking,
so have tissues at hand.
Story Three is Maximilian and Nadia’s story. I could feel the
love they had for each other wrapping around my heart.
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