Thank you Bookworm_Girl for your insights, and like Bookpossum, I rather like the ambiguity of the book. I do like my books to be a bit though, at times offend me or question my own identity.
One can read it on many levels and I read it twice, as the end of the book was somewhat surprising for me. I felt though, at the end, that 'something was up', as the Venetian was never referred to by his own name –seemed to have no identity or did not exist- and he spoke about ‘us’ and ‘our’ when he meant himself.
As an historic novel it is interesting to get a view in life around pasha’s and sultans in those days. But the ‘negative’ of this book and it’s ambiguity is that one is doubting all presented……. Therefore I am going to read up on the state of science in the East and the West of those days. Their shared scientific past and the Islamic scientific influence upon the West in the Middle Ages is also a thing to take into consideration of course.
The sense I got while reading this book, of listening to an inner dialogue with it’s heartaches and conflicts, is beautifully illustrated by the following quote:
’when suddenly the pasja erupted. 'Be rid of him!’ he’d said. ‘If you like, poison him, if you like, free him. You’ll be more at ease.’ I must have glanced at Hoja with fear and hope for a moment. He said he would not free me until ‘they’ realized.'(37).
Turkey is said to have two identities and these days seem in conflict with both of them. The last year political developments point to a more rigid Islamic one, which is problematic for many of it’s population that is used to a certain standard of personal freedom. For those who have read my post on the history of the Armenian at Ani, I think I found a kind of explanation for the distorted sense of history many Turkish people seem to have, in the book of Caroline Finkel ‘ Osman’s dream. The history of the Ottoman empire’
Spoiler:
16.'The past is truly another country in Turkey, whose citizens have been deprived of easy access to the literary and historical works of previous eras by the change of alphabet in 1928 from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet familiar to most of the western world. At the same time, an ongoing programme to make the vocabulary more Turkish is expunging words of Arabic and Persian derivation – the other two components of the rich amalgam that was the Ottoman tongue, today in danger of becoming as ‘dead’ as Latin. On the other hand, works from the Ottoman centuries are now being published in modern script with simplified language, enabling modern readers to gain some understanding of what went before. The situation would otherwise be dire: imagine an English literary canon which lacked anything written before the 1930s!
It once seemed possible that, with the passing of those generations who had learnt the Ottoman language before the change of alphabet, there would be few who were able to read the voluminous documents and manuscripts which are the basic source-material for Ottoman history. However, students continue to train as historians, and learn Ottoman, and they hold university positions in Turkey[…]'