Meryem is a 15 year-old girl in a strict muslim village in the east of Turkey. After she’s been raped by her uncle, the family and the village condemns her to death (due to their customs and religious view, she did a terrible sin). When she failed to kill herself, they the task of getting rid of her on her cousin, Jamal, who has just been released from army service in a commando unit, and is full of war trauma from skirmishes with the Kurds.

Irfan is a rich professor living in Istanbul, who due to a mid-life crisis decides he hates his life and doesn’t really love his wife and leaves home for a life on a boat in the Aegean sea.

“Bliss” isn’t a usual novel. Its goal is not to tell a story – the plot is very simple and can be summarized in a couple of paragraphs. The goal of the author is to convey the situation in modern Turkey through the main characters.

These characters and their surroundings display in a convincing way the conflicts and paradoxes of modern Turkey, where the clash between old-style strict Islam and modern Western lifestyle is very powerful.

Overall it’s a pretty good book. Even if Turkey doesn’t interest you much, the conflicts and issues presented are universal.

Related posts:

1. Book review: “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin
2. Book review: “Moon palace” by Paul Auster
3. Book review: “Everything is illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer
4. Book review: “A Russian novel” by Meir Shalev
5. Book review: “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoy

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