The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay. Another pretty book from our friends at NYRB. This is also the third or fourth in a row that's actually lived up to its book design. Um, this photo doesn't do this book justice, though: the blue of my copy is much nicer.
Anyway . . . This is a very British sort of funny novel. The narrator is traveling in Turkey in the 1950s with her or his (about this more later) aunt and an Anglican priest named Father Chantry-Pigg. Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg want to introduce the Church of England to Turkey, but keep running afoul of imams and Billy Graham (no, really), as well as fellow Brits, all trying to write books about Turkey. Meanwhile, Laurie, the narrator, is struggling with a broken heart.
I'm cribbing a little bit from Jan Morris's introduction when I point out that one of the things that makes the book really work is the sadness under the humor. Morris sees Laurie as female and her relationship with her married lover, Vere, as heavily autobiographical. I see Laurie as pretty ambiguously-gendered. There's really nothing in the text specifically referring to Laurie as a woman and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that he is in fact a man.
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