Bredie, Nicholas
WORK TITLE: Not Constantinople
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WEBSITE: http://nicholasbredie.wixsite.com/website
CITY: Los Angeles
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http://www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/not-constantinople-by-nicholas-bredie
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PERSONAL
Married Nora Lange.
ADDRESS
- Home - Los Angeles, CA.
CAREER
Writer, novelist, educator, and translator. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, university fellow. Previously worked in Istanbul, Turkey, 2010-13.
WRITINGS
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(Translator, with Joanna Howard) Frédéric Boyer, Cows, Noemi Press (Mesilla Park, NM)
- Not Constantinople (novel), Dzanc Books (Ann Arbor, MI), 2017
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including the Believer, Brooklyn Rail, Electric Literature, the Fairy Tale Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Opium, and Puerto del Sol.
SIDELIGHTS
Nicholas Bredie is a writer who lived and worked in Istanbul, Turkey for approximately four years. A contributor to literary periodicals and websites, Bredie is also a translator who is the cotranslator of Cows, a novella by the French writer Frédéric Boyer. In his debut novel, Not Constantinople, Bredie tells the story of an expat couple living and working in Istanbul who come home from their jobs at a university one evening to find squatters living in their apartment.
Commenting on writing an “expat” novel, Bredie told Electric Literature website contributor Maureen Moore that he wanted to diverge from writing a novel similar to other expat novels that focus on things like “travel, romance, intrigue, and a privileged male protagonist ‘living all he can’ seem to reoccur.” He went on to tell Moore: “The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to undermine these possibilities, along with a lot of the romantic orientalism which attends a place like Istanbul. I think this is something about the book that can throw readers expecting the magic of the east, or a love story. When you strip away that stuff, what you’re left with is a kind of disillusionment, which can be funny and absurd but also naked and unsettling.”
Fred and Virginia are the American expats in Istanbul who find that a quirk in Turkish law and a corrupt bureaucracy prevents them from having the Greek family they find squatting in their apartment from being evicted. Furthermore, they discover that the property they are renting is in a type of bureaucratic limbo concerning ownership and occupancy. The couple soon come to living terms with the Greek family, primarily by keeping opposite hours. Fred, however, eventually comes up with a scheme to work with the Greek patriarch to make some more money to finance a house in America.
The racket is for the Greek father to plagiarize papers, which can then be sold to Fred’s own university students. In his interview with Electric Literature website contributor Moore, Bredie noted that Fred may have a “misguided understanding of his privilege of a foreigner abroad, later on he compares himself to a pirate, whether that’s a fair analogy or not, let the reader decide.” Meanwhile, Fred’s get-rich scheme is only part of the story as the American couple have encounters with Kurdish separatists while the Istanbul neighborhood they are living in is slowly transformed into a gentrified community as greedy developers seek to make money selling luxury properties to the elite. “As a love letter to Istanbul … Bredie’s work excels,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of Not Constantinople, p. 65.
ONLINE
Electric Literature, https://electricliterature.com/ (June 21, 2017), Maureen Moore, “How to Write an Expat Novel Without Succumbing to the Old Clichés,” author interview.
Inside out in Istanbul, https://www.insideoutinistanbul.com/ (October 10, 2017), review of Not Constantinople.
Nicholas Bredie Website, http://nicholasbredie.wixsite.com/website (January 13, 2018).
Pen Center USA, https://penusa.org/ (January 13, 2018), author profile.
Skylight Books Website, https://www.skylightbooks.com/ (January 13, 2018), “Nicholas Bredie Discusses His New Novel Not Constantinople, with Andrew Wessels,” event announcement.
- (Translator, with Joanna Howard) Frédéric Boyer, Cows Noemi Press (Mesilla Park, NM), 2014
- Not Constantinople ( novel) Dzanc Books (Ann Arbor, MI), 2017
- Nicholas Bredie Home Page - http://nicholasbredie.wixsite.com/website
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Not Constantinople
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EVENTS
Jun 10, 20175:00 PM @ Skylight Books!
Not Constantinople Launch
So excited to launch my first novel at my favorite indy bookstore in the world. More details to come
Jun 15, 2017
6:30pm, at 1129A State St. • Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Reading at Armada Wine Bar, Santa Barbara
Wonderful proprietors Tucker and Jamie have invited me to read in the courtyard across from the SB Museum of Art. Great wine on tap and cheese after.
Jul 06, 2017
7:30pm @ Powell’s on Hawthorne (3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland)
Powell's Hawthorne Reading
Trilled to be reading at the Northwest's book Mecca.
Jul 11, 2017
1644 Haight St, San Francisco, CA 94117
The Booksmith, San Francisico
Reading at this great indie shop in the Haight. Bring the windowpane for after!
Sep 09, 2017
Soda & Swine
Reading at So Say We All in San Diego
Reading with Amelia Gray, Jac Jemc and Emma Smith-Stevens, which makes me Ringo.
NOT CONSTANTINOPLE
Coming home from dinner, two young American expatriates, Fred and Virginia, find their apartment inhabited by a family that claims to be its rightful owners. They are descendants of a Greek family driven away by the pogroms of the nineteen-fifties. The Greeks intend to ‘flip’ the apartment, and others like it, in the newly gentrifying downtown, and they won’t leave until they've succeeded.In fighting to keep their home, Fred and Virginia become entangled with a variety of characters: an Istanbuli biker gang, Poison’s Greatest Hits; foreign developers looking to “Turn Turk;” terrorists seeking fame through political comics. Their journey through this place where past and present collide in a strange and violent fashion will test their relationship and their ideas of themselves.
Forthcoming from Dzanc Books, 2017
Current Angelino, former Istanbullu, I'm a novelist, teacher and something of an academic. I'm currently collecting short stories and working on a novel set in the 1968 Resurrection City encampment. I live with my wife Nora Lange and our dog Dashiell. More over at Pen Center USA
- Pen Center USA - https://penusa.org/member-profiles-mia-nakaji-monnier-nicholas-bredie
MEMBER PROFILES: MIA NAKAJI MONNIER & NICHOLAS BREDIE
[...]
MEMBER PROFILE: Nicholas Bredie
When and why did you become a member of PEN Center USA?
Recently. Like all good ideas, I wished I’d thought of it sooner. By way of explanation, we had the money for once.What is most meaningful to you about PEN Center USA?
See below. In addition, Los Angeles is a great literary city. It deserves a great literary institution like PEN Center USA.PEN Centers share a Freedom To Write mission, which means we believe that people should be able to read and write freely. What does Freedom To Write mean to you?
My wife and I lived in Turkey for several years where we experienced the frog-boiling sensation of the gradual abrogation of freedom of expression. It has reached a fever pitch there now. But that it could happen there, in a democracy, to the committed and talented people we met, means it could happen anywhere. That is why we need organizations like PEN Center USA.Writers are using their digital media platforms to engage with readers and other writers on serious topics. Can you give an example of a writer or organization that is doing this well?
There are too many to count (shout out to Radio Ambulante). I think the next step is getting money into these people’s hands. Information may be “free,” but writing is work.What is the one book you wish you had written and why?
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.What is your favorite quote?
“It then fell to me to say a few words, by way of thanks for the prize, as it were. Just before the ceremony, in great haste and with the greatest reluctance, I had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty. After I had delivered my speech, which lasted altogether no more than three minutes, the minister, who had understood nothing of what I had said, indignantly jumped up from his seat and shook his fist in my face.”—Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s NephewWho would be your ideal literary dinner guest (living or dead)?
Nora Lange.What are you working on now?
A novel set in and around the 1968 Resurrection City encampment in Washington, D.C.Nicholas Bredie is the author of the novel Not Constantinople, forthcoming from Dzanc Books, Spring 2017. With Joanna Howard, he is the co-translator of Frédéric Boyer’s novella Cows, published by Noemi Press, Summer 2014. His writing has appeared in The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, The Fairy Tale Review, Opium, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral fellow in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at USC.
- Dzanc Books - http://www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/not-constantinople-by-nicholas-bredie
Not Constantinople—JACKET panel.jpg
NOT CONSTANTINOPLE BY NICHOLAS BREDIE
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Publication Date: June 10 2017
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-941088-75-3Quantity:
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A dispute over an Istanbul apartment leads two American expats into lawlessness and intrigue in this comic debut novelFred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.
Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as "tight and imaginative," Not Constantinople is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.
PRAISE FOR NOT CONSTANTINOPLE
“Utterly charming. Nick Bredie's debut novel is by turns whimsical and deeply affecting, managing to illuminate both the displaced couple at the heart of it and the city that maddens and liberates them.”
—TC Boyle, author of The Terranauts“In spare, understated prose, our author captures the privileged aimlessness and corrupted romanticism of the contemporary white American expatriate. Bredie is a sly and unsparing writer for the post-Hemingway set, revealing a world of travel that is stripped of illusions and glamour.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The SympathizerABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Bredie is a writer who lived and worked in Istanbul, Turkey from 2010 to 2013. Currently he is a University Fellow at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Nora Lange, and their dog. Not Constantinople is his first novel. - Skylight Books - https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/nicholas-bredie-discusses-his-new-novel-not-constantinople-andrew-wessels
NICHOLAS BREDIE DISCUSSES HIS NEW NOVEL NOT CONSTANTINOPLE, WITH ANDREW WESSELS
Not Constantinople (Dzanc Books)
Fred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students. Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as “tight and imaginative,” Not Constantinope is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.
Praise for Not Constantinople
“Utterly charming. Nick Bredie’s debut novel is by turns whimsical and deeply affecting, managing to illuminate both the displaced couple at the heart of it and the city that maddens and liberates them.”—TC Boyle, author of The Terranauts
“In spare, understated prose, our author captures the privileged aimlessness and corrupted romanticism of the contemporary white American expatriate. Bredie is a sly and unsparing writer for the post-Hemingway set, revealing a world of travel that is stripped of illusions and glamour.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
“Incredibly smart and funny in that way that pleasingly sneaks up on a person, in line after line after line. Bredie’s novel is an enormously confident and layered debut.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“The ugly American gets a slacker reboot in this sometimes funny, sometimes mercilessly sharp novel. Vividly written, Not Constantinople is all about the ways it’s lead character’s supposed self-awareness doesn’t keep him from unraveling. It tells us much about our privileged insularity, our orientalism, our posed romanticism, and our drive for destruction.”—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
Nicholas Bredie is the author the novel Not Constantinople, forthcoming from Dzanc Books, June 2017. With Joanna Howard, he is the translator of Frédéric Boyer’s novella Cows, published by Noemi Press. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, BOMB, The Fairy Tale Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. After living and working in Istanbul, Turkey, he is now in Los Angeles with his wife, Nora Lange.
Andrew Wessels is a writer, translator, editor, book designer, and teacher. His first book of poetry, A Turkish Dictionary, is published by 1913 Press. Semi Circle—a chapbook of my translations of the Turkish poet Nurduran Duman—was published in 2016 by Goodmorning Menagerie. His poems, essays, translations, and collaborations have been published in VOLT, Witness, Fence, Tammy Journal, Jacket2, Asymptote, and Colorado Review, among others.
Event date:
Saturday, June 10, 2017 - 5:00pm
Event address:
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027 - Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/how-to-write-an-expat-novel-without-succumbing-to-the-old-clichés-2b17c12a7d50
How to Write an Expat Novel Without Succumbing to the Old Clichés
Nicholas Bredie on life in Istanbul, the start of an uprising, and subverting the tropes of the expat novel
Maureen MooreFollow
Maureen Moore is the Associate Director of ALOUD, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ award-winning author and conversation series at the LA Public Library.
Jun 21, 2017After having spent a few weeks “living” in Turkey with author Nick Bredie and Nora Lange and experiencing the thrilling 2013 Gezi Park uprising alongside them and millions of Turks, I sat down to read Bredie’s new novel, Not Constantinople, with romantic ideas about revisiting the Turkey I’d seen and felt, and stepping into the fictional characters he’d created loosely based on his partner and himself. And so went those expectations. Bredie’s novel took me, instead, on a wild ride of disillusioned expats and the drama they attracted and created for themselves in contemporary Istanbul. It did everything but disappoint, and although I was hungry for more, I at least got to ask the author a bit more about how he conceived of the whole thing.
Maureen Moore: You’ve written a captivating story, an expat adventure, a chronicle of an American teacher in contemporary Turkey, with romance, intrigue, political drama…all to say a good part of which was inspired by your own three-year experience of living in Istanbul. Having walked some of the very streets you describe in the book with you, I couldn’t help but be transported back to magical, mysterious Istanbul. And yet, for your main characters Fred and Virginia, there seems to be more a feeling of disenchantment and disillusionment with the place. What were you hoping to say about Istanbul with this book?
Nicholas Bredie: As the book quickly diverged from the experience of living in Istanbul to what I guess you could call an expat adventure, I started looking at other expat novels as models for how the story might go. It’s kind of a genre, the expatriate story. You read enough of them and things like travel, romance, intrigue, and a privileged male protagonist ‘living all he can’ seem to reoccur. What befalls this guy can really vary: happy self actualization a la Chad Newsome or Midnight in Paris, total loss as in Tender is the Night or Let it Come Down, or what I’d term the Spanish solution, the sort of mild melancholy epiphany you get at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Leaving the Atocha Station. This might be the most satisfying outcome. However, I didn’t really want to go in any of these directions. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to undermine these possibilities, along with a lot of the romantic orientalism which attends a place like Istanbul. I think this is something about the book that can throw readers expecting the magic of the east, or a love story. When you strip away that stuff, what you’re left with is a kind of disillusionment, which can be funny and absurd but also naked and unsettling. That’s what I was aiming for.
MM: Something that contributed to that unsettling feeling was seeing everything about the city written in its American English equivalent. I think I found that to be rare, finding these foreign names of places and things in English. Even one of Turkey’s most famous writers is referred to as Mr. Cotton. I’d love to hear it a little bit about this choice.
NB: I think it is connected to the idea of undermining or disenchanting. Having the names in plain English takes some of the exoticism out of them. There are some linguistic jokes in there too. For example Mr. Cotton’s neighborhood, Orhan Pamuk’s neighborhood, is Nişantaşı. He takes some care explaining the origin of that name in Istanbul, his memoir. It translates as “target stone,” because that was where the Ottomans set up their targets to practice archery and shooting. But Nişantaşı is also the Turkish word for “starch,” and it’s a kind of tony neighborhood, so I translated it as ‘The Starch.’
MM: For the reader, I also felt it further marked Fred and Virginia’s foreignness, as if they didn’t want to call those places by their Turkish names. It further separated them from the expected experience of the place.
NB: When we moved abroad, my uncle who was a foreign correspondent for a number of years said that the most important thing you can do is abandon analogy. To not try and compare, and make your experience fit some preconceived notions. How the characters behave and how they diverge ultimately in the book has to do with how they deal with their expectations of life abroad. In real life it is a situation of extremes: there is no family and no old friends and little language and a host of received notions about the place. Insert a Greek family who may or may not have the rights to your apartment and you have a real high-pressure fictional situation.
MM: That’s so true; I spent some time abroad as well in Portugal, living and working, and daily life is more complicated or sometimes stressful. People deal with it in different ways. There’s a quote somewhere that the narrator says about the character Fred: that he hadn’t left his own well-tamed country to play by rules abroad.
NB: Yeah and that is Fred’s particular maybe misguided understanding of his privilege of a foreigner abroad, later on he compares himself to a pirate, whether that’s a fair analogy or not, let the reader decide. But he certainly decided that what it means to be abroad is to be above rules.
MM: Right, take certain liberties, one of which is this elaborate scheme that he invents with the Greek. Are you interested in sharing that?NB: Oh yeah, I think that’s even on the jacket copy. The essay-writing scheme. The essay-writing scheme is something that, I hate to say, was in part taken from life. There was an illicit essay-writing service at the university where we worked, and there was a certain amount of pressure put on teachers to try and discover the plagiarized papers. I mean this is common, it happens at Harvard too. After a while though you started feeling like you should be paid extra to play policeman, and you also felt bad for these kids who were doing an undergraduate degree in a second language. I could never do that. They’re under an enormous amount of pressure to produce and obviously that kind of situation drives people to cheat. And then you as a teacher heard about how much money they were paying for these papers, you started thinking, I mean, yeah, *nervous laughter.*
MM: So the other big event already mentioned is that this Greek family moves in to Fred and Virginia’s apartment right off the bat. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think: I was in your apartment in Turkey, and for a second I was like wait, did this happen to Nick and Nora in real life? Because I never heard about it, and I think I would have. Is this something that has happened, or could happen, in contemporary Turkey?
NB: To say that I have any expertise in the real estate laws of Turkey would be a lie. That said, we moved into a gentrifying neighborhood that was a mix of very hip cafes and these abandoned buildings. It took a while for us to understand that the buildings were abandoned because their ownership was contested. That it was a neighborhood where Greeks and Armenians and Jews had lived until the 1950s, when there were pogroms and other repressive measures which drove them from Istanbul. I don’t know if the ownership was contested for our apartment. But our landlord was like ‘don’t change the name on the electricity or the water bill, just link your bank account. This is what everyone does.’
MM: Link your bank account to a bill that’s in someone else’s name that you don’t know?
NB: Yeah, you just linked the account number of the bill to your account. At the same time, a building that was abandoned one day would be lavishly restored the next day, and you had to figure that somebody had received a deed or lease to it somehow. That was the seed of the idea of having the Greeks come back for their apartment.10 Great Novels of Exile and Dislocation
A Reading List from Patricia Engel
electricliterature.comMM: Did you have any contact with someone who had experienced something remotely similar to a family moving in to reclaim their property?
NB: I had heard stories of squatters ‘selling’ apartments and then reappearing later. Then around the time that I was starting the novel, Nora was teaching this great article by the scholar Amy Mills about the minorities, the Greeks and the Jews and the Armenians, and the void that they had left having been suddenly driven from the city, and it reminded me of stories of people trying to get their property back after the Holocaust, not only art or money but also property.
MM: In terms of the writing process, I was curious how much of that story did you write while living there versus here in L.A.?
NB: I wrote about three quarters of the first draft there, starting in 2012. In retrospect, what’s interesting was I was writing about real estate and development tied up in Istanbul’s history and minorities. Beyond the stuff in our neighborhood, I had heard stories about a historic Roma quarter near the city walls that had been demolished and replaced with what they called Ottoman style townhouses. That happened in 2008, and while I was writing the first draft there had been rumors that the park at Taksim Square was going to be replaced with a recreation of the Ottoman barracks that it had in turn replaced in the 1940s. It was one of these sort of absurd stories that you felt couldn’t be real. I mean there were like ten kids with flyers standing outside the metro station saying, ‘there are plans to change this park into a shopping mall in the form of the original artillery barracks,’ and you know you kind of shrug it off like ‘this is impossible.’ But then of course I was writing and I kind of thought, ‘well this would be a funny fictional story to explore’ whether it actually happens or not. And then lo and behold that plan turned out to be true. As you know, because you were there, the protest against the destruction of the park developed into this huge movement and protests and sometimes riots that consumed the city and also made it into the book. The book was headed towards some version of that event, the destruction of the park, before it became a reality. And so when it happened and we were caught up in it, I did have this incredible sensation of life imitating art. This led to a decision that I’m of two minds about. Since the book was already underway, I decided not to change the timeline of the narrative to fit the historical facts. So the Gezi moment in the book takes place in ‘mid-autumn,’ while the real event took place in May and June, 2013. I didn’t change it in part because I don’t want to claim ownership over the Gezi events, they belong to the people who put their lives on the line standing up to the powerful and the cops. At the same time, Gezi happened to be the perfect culmination of themes already at work in the book. And since there is no such thing as coincidence, Gezi also gave me a way to fill the hole I’d dug undermining the tropes of the East and expat romance, which was commitment, of a political nature.
MM: That’s pretty wild you had heard of some notion of this before it all unfolded.
NB: Yeah, well it was absurd on paper, which was what attracted me to it in the first place. But in retrospect nothing was out of the realm of the possibility considering what has happened since. I think what’s sadder is that in some ways that Gezi moment was a kind of high point and things have gotten a lot tougher after that politically and economically. And so in some ways the world that is portrayed in the novel almost a historical period.
MM: I remember being there with you guys. Literally the day after the initial uprising or revolt in the park, the Saturday after people had gotten gassed and everything, there was this incredible feeling of solidarity and unity and people of different generations, different walks of life. It was so fascinating to be an outsider, even with a superficial understanding of things. Just to kind of witness that moment.
NB: It was a special time and place.
Not Constantinople
Publishers Weekly. 264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Not Constantinople
Nicholas Bredie. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $26.95
(320p) ISBN 978-1-941088-75-3
In his debut novel, Bredie follows two American expatriates adrift in Turkey, teaching writing to privileged students. Fred and Virginia return to their Istanbul apartment one day to discover a Greek family has moved in. Their efforts to evict the interlopers run afoul of robust squatters' rights, a complicated property history, and a corrupt bureaucracy. Instead, they uneasily share the apartment by keeping opposite hours. With an eye on quickly earning enough for a house back in America, Fred hatches a plan to employ the Greek father to plagiarize papers his own students would rather overpay for than write. Bredie loses the focus on this scheme, preferring long descriptions of neighborhoods and life as a foreigner in Istanbul. The thin plot and Virginia's sudden departure for the States (and disappearance from the novel) undercut any lasting investment in the characters. As a love letter to Istanbul and an opportunity to show off his insider knowledge of the city, Bredie's work excels. However, his characters remain oddly detached and aimless in the face of rapid gentrification and political upheaval, preferring to complain about expensive alcohol and tourists overrunning the city. (June)
- Inside Out in Instanbul
https://www.insideoutinistanbul.com/review-not-constantinople/
Word count: 562Review of Not Constantinople
Posted on October 10, 2017 by Goreme1990The story in Not Constantinople follows a young American couple who come to Istanbul planning to work for a few years, save money and then go back home to buy a house. Fred and Virginia’s dream comes to an abrupt halt when they return to their rented Istanbul apartment one night to find a family of Greek squatters have moved in. Due to an anomaly in Turkish law they’re claiming ownership of the property, and Fred and Virginia, the paying tenants, are unable to evict them. What follows is a tense stand-off that evolves into an uneasy alliance.
I found Not Constantinople an unsatisfying read partly because the main character is an immature and half-formed boy/man who isn’t that likeable. He lives on the edge of other people’s lives and it’s almost as if he hopes a stint somewhere ‘other’ will fill in the blanks of his personality. Virginia, like most of the women in the novel, is incompletely written and quite two-dimensional.
Istanbul is the backdrop to their story, based on carefully selected places, people and moments in time. The European side of the city features heavily, home to foreigners who prefer to experience Turkey with a Western flavour. Most of the Turks Fred and Virginia meet are American educated wealthy hipsters who like to dabble in the dark side of city life by attending gypsy gatherings while remaining safe in the arms of family money. Mention is made of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, but here they are a form of initiation for young expat men fighting for democracy armed with and protected by their foreign passports, in a kind of Boys’ Own adventure story.
Unfortunately, Not Constantinople adheres to the myth of Istanbul as an exotic city in which everyone speaks a version of English and daily life fits into a recognisable Western paradigm. The author, Nicholas Bredie, wants us to believe the city is seductive and glistening but never really backs this up with scenes in the book. He tries to ramp up the notion of the city as a strange and somewhat primitive foreign place by using literal translations of local neighbourhoods so that it reads a little like a fairy tale. The aim is for the reader think of the city as somehow alien and unknowable but it comes across as bland and mundane.
Had the author taken the time to explore just what makes Istanbul so alluringly different through better developed versions of Fred and Virginia, and written that into the pages, Not Constantinople would have been a more compelling read. As it is, the flow of the story isn’t helped by the insertion of an unfinished script intertwined with their experiences. The people in these scenes are half described and the scenes they play out confuse, rather than add to the main story.
Although it won’t join my list of favourite books set in Istanbul, Not Constantinople is far from the worst book I’ve ever read and I’m curious to know what others make of it. If you want to be one of the first to comment, click here to buy a copy of Not Constantinople by Nicholas Bredie, and then let me know your thoughts.