Point of View

The novel uses the literary technique of the frame story. Faruk Darvinoğlu, a Turkish intellectual, narrates the frame story, which is also the preface to the novel. Faruk inserts the dedication and the quote from Marcel Proust that precede the preface. The narrator appears at first to be the sole narrator of the inside narrative, but the reader cannot be sure because his double also writes a few stories. These filters provide the novels perspectives. The narrator proves to be unreliable at some points in the narrative, complicating the issue of point of view. The role of Faruk in the translating and revising of the manuscript as well as the possibility that he wrote it himself remain as puzzles to be solved.

Language and Meaning

The inner narrative, that is, the seventeenth-century manuscript Faruk found, begins as an adventure novel with the Italian narrator's...