I have no idea who killed whom and why, and I'm never going to find out: I gave up after four hours.
Unfortunately it did not hold my attention.
And so we are, but the pace of description and plotting is as slow, and the story as digressive, as the arabesques adorning the margins of medieval manuscripts. The story begins - intriguingly - with the murder of an illuminator of manuscripts, and we expect to be taken into the world of scribes and illustrators. Is the translation poor? Are the sentences too elaborate and baroque? Is the difference between an contemporary Anglo-phone audience and a medieval Turkish court too wide to remain interested? Temporal and cultural distance does not prevent the enjoyment of say, Umberto Eco's work or Garcia Marquez's, though. It's hard to say what does not work here.
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