Ihsan Oktay Anar's 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a
skeleton key to the ever-inventive author's fictional world set in
the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs
and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, "as reported by the
narrators of events and relators of traditions." By turns humorous
and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly
imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors
in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the
crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and
the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d'etats,
Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation.
Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty
parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, The Book of Devices is
Anar at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a
twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease
and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a
cabinet of dreamy curiosities.
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