Turkish Delights: A Novel - Hardcover

The prolific Slavitt (Short Stories Are Not Real Life, etc.) here offers three first-person narratives--one Turkish and ancient, one 19th-century and Venetian, one contemporary--in a tour de force that attempts, only half-successfully, to interlink the stories in various ways. All the pieces concern family conflicts, in particular the predicament of a son who's not the beneficiary of primogeniture. In the first, Selim, the fourth son of a Turkish Sultan (``the son of a slave, for all the women...are slaves, are they not?''), is cared for by Hyacinth, ostensibly a eunuch. Selim: ``I was told over and over again to trust strangers if I had to but fear my relatives.'' The usual fate of a younger son is death, but Selim avoids that with the help of Hyacinth and a series of misadventures ... la The Arabian Nights. The second narrative concerns Pietro, the second son of a 19th-century Venetian noble family; again, the fate of being born second results in misadventures, here foreshadowed by the death of Pietro's uncle Giancarlo, killed in a duel, and climaxed by Pietro's attempted elopement with his brother's fianc‚e. Foiled, Pietro is sent to a monastery. In the third story, Asher, a writer and American Jew, narrates his slice-of-life (in the form of an interview) from Cambridge, Massachusetts: a family with ``delusions of dynasty,'' a divorce, and the usual panoply of 20th-century problems. Finally, Slavitt tries nobly to tie all the stories together. Variations on the themes, then, of sexual repression and cruel family expectations that can be thwarted only by rebellion. Slavitt, still gifted, still erratic, carries it off with aplomb- -even when those loose ends either don't get tied up or get explained all too neatly. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Betrayals, sexual revenge and the havoc that family members wreak on one another reverberate through this intriguing novel, in which Slavitt ( Alice at 80 ) splices together three stories with vastly different settings. The first tale recreates the exotic, treacherous world of a Turkish sultan's seraglio--a gilded prison from which Selim, the sultan's son, plans his escape, aided by a black eunuch slave. The second narrative features Pietro, the callow son of a 19th-century Venetian noble family, who tries to elope with his obnoxious brother's treacherous fiancee. In the third tale, set in Cambridge, Mass., in 1975, Asher, a Yale-educated Jewish writer, mulls over his psychoanalysis, impending divorce, vasectomy and guilt over failing to meet his parents' expectations. The book ingeniously curves back on itself: Asher is writing a novel about Selim, whose fate is revealed in the closing pages; Pietro, banished to a monastery where he, too, is writing about Selim, also makes a last-minute re-entry. Slavitt uses the sordid manipulation of the seraglio as a metaphor for family life and for mundane reality. An exotic, touching, oddly ennobling novel.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.