When Osman, a Turk, met Yiannis, a Greek, by chance, in Izmir--known to Greeks, and to history, as Smyrna--both men still believed, to a greater or lesser extent, the national mythologies of Turkey and Greece. There was, however, an issue-they looked like identical twins. Osman, the more thoughtful of the two, could not get this similarity out of his mind. It set him on a quest to peel back the plaster of Turkish and Greek national identities, to find the mosaic beneath. This is the main theme of the novel, yet given the "millennium-long delicate and deadly embrace" of Greece and Turkey, and...
When Osman, a Turk, met Yiannis, a Greek, by chance, in Izmir--known to Greeks, and to history, as Smyrna--both men still believed, to a greater or le...
