The Janissary Tree (Yashim the Eunuch #1) By Jason Goodwin

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Jason Goodwin has unleashed his talent on a series of mysteries set in nineteenth-century Istanbul and starring the unlikeliest and most engaging of detectives: Yashim the eunuch.

The Janissary Tree is the first in the series, and the year is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire feels he has no choice but to follow suit. But just as he's poised to announce sweeping political change, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind the killings?

Deep in the Abode of Felicity, the most forbidden district of Topkapi Palace, the sultan - ruler of the Black Sea and the White, ruler of Rumelia and Mingrelia, lord of Anatolia and Ionia, Romania and Macedonia, Protector of the Holy Cities, steely rider through the realms of bliss - announces, Send for Yashim. Leading us through the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, Yashim places together the clues.

He is not alone. He depends on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and the Creole-born queen mother. He manages to find sweet salvation in the arms of another man's wife (this is not your everyday eunuch!). And he introduces us to the Janissaries.

For four hundred years, they were the empire's elite soldiers. But they grew too powerful, and ten years earlier the sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback? And if they are, how can they be stopped without throwing Istanbul into political chaos? The Janissary Tree (Yashim the Eunuch #1)

Dicono che è il momento buono per leggere, ma per me che leggo quasi un libro al giorno non è per nulla un buon momento. La testa se ne va per i fatti suoi e non riesco a seguire le indagini di Yashim l'eunuco. Anche se mi fa tornare a Istanbul e al mio bellissimo viaggio di settembre.
Che poi, cerco di evadere pubblicando su Instagram una foto di suddetto viaggio, e qualcuno crede addirittura che io mi trovi in questo momento a Istanbul, quando invece sono rintanata in casa da molto prima che questa città venisse dichiarata zona rossa. E non sono uscita neanche a fare la spesa, perché non ho mascherina - non se ne trovano o chissà, forse non sono neanche mai arrivate perché qui da noi servono meno (@#€£$!!!) - e preferisco non rischiare di portarmi il virus in casa. (Sì, lo so che la mascherina serve agli infetti e non ai sani, ma ho paura lo stesso).

Ho finito il libro e devo dire che anche se mi ha fatto ritornare a Istanbul e mi ha fatto vedere un periodo transitorio della storia turca - anche se ho letto commenti in cui si parla di madornali errori storici, sebbene io, da ignorante, non me ne sia resa conto - ho trovato le indagini troppo confusionarie e, in seguito, la soluzione troppo banale.
Resta il fatto che il romanzo mi ha fatto tornare il desiderio di rivedere le mie foto e di immaginare di essere lì, in piazza dell'ippodromo (Sultanahmet Meydanı) la piazza con le colonne, l'obelisco egizio sulla base scolpita dell'imperatore Teodosio, e vicino a Santa Sofia (Ayasofya Müzesi) e alla Moschea Blu (Sultanahmet Camii). 320 Još jedna knjiga koja me je osvojila na prečac i koju sam progutala u jednom dahu... i to davne 2006. pre pojave (i popularnosti) turskih serija kod nas... :) Dobar krimić s primesama istorijskog i egzotike... :) 320 I cannot enjoy this Historical Mystery Novel.

The mystery part has not much mystery to solve, I believe readers could guess it easily before the protagonist reveal the culprit. No need to reveal more. It is one of the easiest mystery that I've ever read.

For setting and background, at first I have high hope with eunuch detective and his unusual friends. But then, the details of the characters are not convincing. At read status update, I wrote I found 2 flaws in details. Well, I don't remember what are they. Maybe one of them is regarding castrated eunuch has moustache. 320 This book is very, very encouraging for prospective authors of historical fiction: By all means, go ahead and write a book and don't bother to make any research: there are enough idiots out there (including myself) with plenty of time and money to spend recklessly on a boring story and facts that don't simply match. This is a waste!

- Many of the names are made-up; Yashim, Preen, Palmuk! What the heck? These names are not Turkish at all!
- The story transpires in 1836; there are visionary characters in the novel that have last names; a century before the relevant law was put into effect! (Murad Eslek!? Ertogrul Aslan!?)
- There is no such thing as a Karagozi sect or group? Janissaries were Bektashis. And the author must have known that because he even opens the book by one of his sayings.
- A Nasrani tekke? Just because you love the sound of the word? A Nasrani is a Christian. They couldn't possibly have had tekkes. They had their churches for Christ's sake! Yes, indeed.
- The Sultan was Mahmud the Second, not the Fourth. There was never a Sultan called Mahmud the Fourth. As a matter of fact, Mahmud the Fourth is a very popular joke among Turkish youth; when they want to mock someone who loves showing off their rather limited history knowledge, they ask about the Mahmud the Fourth. Well, the author seems to have hit the mark with this one, inadvertently.
- Selim was not Mahmud the Second's father (let alone Mahmud IV!) Selim was his paternal uncle. His father was Abdulhamid I.
- Galata Bridge's construction date!?
- Well the dialogue between the Kizlar Aga and Validé was especially hilarious. Validé calls him Kizlar for the covenience's sake apparently. Nevertheless she should have called him Aga, for historical acuracy's sake. Kizlar agasi means The girls' Chief; in the novel the Chief gets called Girls! That would not only be inaccurate but also confusing in the presence of, well yes, many girls.
- Tea was not a common commodity in Turkey until 1940s.
- There is one page where he talks about a child, who would later sit in the First Kemalist National Assembly, whatever the heck that means. Are you kidding me? The first Grand National Assembly assembled in 1920, but it couldn't be farther from being Kemalist. Let's accept it was. Then this fictional character would be of 90 years of age. Well, guess what; the oldest person in the said assembly was 70 years old.
- Aya Sofya being the highest point in the whole İstanbul? Well, let me tell you that; even if it isn't for the Galata Tower, or other mosques built atop higher hills, the Beyazit Tower, a key factor in the plot, was and is way higher than Aya Sofya.

There are many more inaccuracies. These are the ones I have been able to pinpoint at one glance and without Wikipedia. And I am not a history buff. Actually one might pass a fun time trying to find out all the inaccuracies in this novel.

I don't know what should possess a writer to make all that stuff up. This is orientalism 2.0. Imagine an author writing about the Tudors except that how Henry the 11th decides to avail himself of a certain Fuckerby's services of investigate nature! This is outrageous!

At first I was intending to write something about how historical fiction is a tricky genre; how you create a world within an already existent world, how n author should delineate the frame in which to act, how fine a line a historical fiction treads on etc. etc. But no, this one is a joke. 320 Sometimes, the same thing that makes a writer a brilliant historian prevents him from becoming something much more humble, say, a writer of mysteries. Jason Goodwin, whose book The Lord of the Horizons was a wonderful short history of the Ottoman Empire, tripped up a bit when he wrote his The Janissary Tree. The hero of the book is an investigator who also happens to be a eunuch. In the approaching twilight years of the Empire, Yashim tries to understand a plot to bring down the Sultanate on the tenth anniversary of the suppression of the Janissaries, those descendants of the original armies of Mehmet and Suleiman the Magnificent, who grew too fat, too lazy, too privileged.

Except when one is writing a mystery, it is possible to be too ambitious. A revolution is perhaps too big a subject, and one feels the plot tugging a bit at times as the suthor struggles to keep his focus sharp.

On the plus side, Yashim is a delightful character -- and that is almost half the battle. The other half, which is scattered all across Istanbul, is the problem. I hope Goodwin manages in the subsequent Yashim stories to narrow his focus so as to give Yashim and his friends more scope.
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I have to admit that I totally don’t get what the fuss is all about. The Janissary Tree bears all the earmarks of a first novel, including a healthy crop of irritating literary tics that I sincerely hope Goodwin will outgrow (to name one: the habit of ending many, many chapters with ridiculously purple Perils of Pauline-esque “cliff-hangers” [of this variety: “Little did he know how soon he would be seeing his friend again—and under what shocking circumstances!”]). Okay, I made that one up, but it is true in spirit. They’re silly and they’re juvenile, and if Goodwin didn't have the wit to murder his darlings, his editor should have done it for him. Goodwin is not especially handy at either dialogue or characterization, and the fact of the matter is that his main character in this novel isn’t Yashim but the city of Istanbul. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it makes for some slogging when Goodwin stops to give you a lecture on architectural or social history and forgets that he has a plot he’s supposed to be carrying forward. Indeed, like all too many writers of historical fiction, Goodwin can’t bear the thought of leaving out one single detail of the many he apparently uncovered in his research, but a little goes a long way and, in this book, a lot is soporific. Despite Goodwin’s obvious care with the historical setting, moreover, I was never able to suspend disbelief in one key particular: that Yashim-the-Eunuch could possibly move in and out of all the strata of society in which Goodwin places him. Without that, the book simply doesn’t work. Finally, Goodwin’s obvious terror that a reader might actually think Yashim was, God forbid, homosexual leads him to a ham-handed hetero sex scene that I hope was as embarrassing for him to write as it was for me to read. 320 The setting of the The Janissary Tree> is fascinating: the novel takes place in 1836 in Istanbul, with the Ottoman empire on the cusp between tradition and the modernity that will ultimately destroy it. And the main character, Yashim, who is a eunuch, certainly provides a twist on the traditional detective! However, I can’t say that I loved the novel as a novel, rather than as a thinly veiled history lesson about a rather forgotten period in history. In fact, every character was ready to spout off pages of Ottoman history or the arrangement of the Sultan’s harem, at the drop of a hat, so that we, the readers, understood what was going on. But since they actually lived through these events, why would they spend so much time talking about them? That’s a completely unnatural, novelistic contrivance.

As for Yashim himself, I never felt like I got to know him at all throughout the course of the novel – his two distinguishing characteristics (being a eunuch; being a good cook) defined him and we never saw any growth in the character. He would start to be angsty about having been, err, eunuch-ized, and then he’d suppress that angst and cook something and learn some more Ottoman history (plus his being a eunuch seemingly does not hinder him in the least in his affair with a beautiful lady whom he encounters during the course of his investigation. I am not 100% sure that Yashim would be physically capable of what he does… hmmm!). Lastly, the solution to the mystery was rushed and not very well thought out; I would have liked to know how the villain had managed to carry out some of his plans and who assisted him and the two separate mysteries that Yashim was supposed to be solving weren't very well-connected.

Also, one small and completely infuriating thing is that Jason Goodwin keeps referring to the Janissaries as “Karagozi” Sufis, which is just bizarre, because he wrote an Ottoman history book and therefore undoubtedly knows that the Janissaries were followers of the Bektashi Sufis. Did he just not want to offend any existing religious group by using their name in a work of fiction? It constantly takes me out of the story!

That said, I did like the setting a lot and the recipes were mouthwatering, so I'm giving it an extra star. 320 I tried it, but would not consider reading further in the series. The slow pace with abundance of historical detail brought the progress of the plot to a mournful halt on many occasions. For me, at least, a little OTtoman Empire goes a long way. 320 Surprised this won the Edgar Award. Book was pretty dry and a little disjointed. I suppose that when the hero was in mortal danger, I was supposed to be nervous on his account, but I wasn't. The stakes if the eunuch failed his mission were pretty high--four terrible murders about to be committed, the sultan and his mother would be killed, city in flames, revolution and invasion, no more French novels--but I was blithely unconcerned.

Completely lacking in suspense. Also it was pretty obvious who the thief was and who the ringleader of the Janissaries was as well--since there weren't that many culprits to choose from (i.e., two). So when the end reveal happened, I was like yes, you should have guessed that 100 pages back Inspector but you had to spend all that valuable time making intricate dinners for yourself. This being said, it was not an altogether bad book and I will most likely read the sequel.

I just hope the sequel doesn't have GIANT paragraphs like this one did. Some seemed to stretch on for a page or more. Another thing that royally bugged me throughout was the author's unnecessary vignettes of the crowd and random passers-by. Just leafing through, found this example: Alexandra Stanopolis, a Greek girl of marriageable age, had her bottom pinched sixteen times and hoarded the secret to her death in Trabzon, fifty-three years later, when she finally revealed it to her daughter-in-law, who herself died in New York City.

What the hell has this to do with anything? Inserts of the following random noise that are sprinkled throughout the book only detracted from the themes and plot at hand and takes the reader out of the story completely (and made me cranky). Instead of the above, would be nice to have learned about the main character more since the author was very coy about details. Or his two friends--the transvestite and the Polish ambassador. Maybe hoarding interesting backgrounds and giving us slices of extraneous detail, author hoped the many plot holes would be ignored. 320 Romanas, alsuojantis painiomis paslaptimis ir prabangia, keista egzotika. Ne aš taip sugalvojau – ant nugarėlės taip.
Tai nežinau, kuo jis ten alsuoja, bet tos paslaptys ne tokios painios. Ar būtų ne tokios painios, jei ne keistoka autoriaus pasakojimo maniera. Apie prabangą nežinau, ką pasakyt. Kažkaip labiau įstrigo lenkų pasiuntinio batų tepalu ištepti kojų pirštai, kad nešviestų pro skylėtus batus. Keista egzotika – na, jei nebūtų keista, nebūtų ir egzotika, ne? Bet tiek jau to, pakalbėkime apie patį romaną.
Lyg ir turėtų būti istorinis detektyvas. Istorijos yra, nepasiginčysi. Pabarstyta kruopelėmis, tinkamai įpinta į tekstą. O štai su detektyvu – liūdniau. Pradėkim nuo to, kad nepatikėčiau pagrindiniam veikėjui, eunuchui Jašimui, suieškoti po skalbimo dingusios kojinės – nesu tikras, kad susitvarkytų. Ne, jis viską atskleidžia ir viską išsiaiškina, bet labiau ne savo proto pastangomis, o tiesiog išlaukdamas, kol paslaptys pačios iškils paviršiun.
Pasakojimas trukčiojantis, vietomis pernelyg kapotas, neišlaikantis tęstinumo, nors viskas lyg ir neišsibarsto, sueina į vieną visumą. Bet skaitymo malonumą tai gadino.
Va, tos „keistos egzotikos“ ir atmosferos – buvo pakankamai. Ir tai bene didžiausias knygos pliusas.
Skysti trys iš penkių. Vargu ar kada grįšiu prie serijos.
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