Nights of Plague

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Orhan Pamuk, Ekin Oklap: Nights of Plague (2022, Faber & Faber, Limited)

English language

Published Dec. 6, 2022 by Faber & Faber, Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-571-35292-0
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4 stars (2 reviews)

4 editions

Machinations of nations, told via plague

4 stars

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 …