Jason Goodwin's The Bellini Card has a nose for the truth
My favorite line of the day is from The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin's third novel featuring the most thoughtful, brooding polyglot late-Ottoman eunuch investigator in all of crime fiction:"The sultan screwed up his face and opened his mouth as if to scream, then whisked a handkerchief from the desk and sneezed into it loudly and happily.For more on the Edgar Award-winning author, click here and scroll down.
"Yashim blinked. In the Balkans, people said you sneezed whenever you told a lie."
© Peter Rozovsky 2010
Labels: historical crime fiction, historical mysteries, history, Istanbul, Jason Goodwin, Turkey
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 9:59 PM
15 Comments:
Hmm. I'm obviously going to have look at this sneezing/lying correlation more closely.
I wonder if Balkan spies tried especially hard to keep their allergies under control in the nineteenth century, when this novel was set.
Allergies would seem to be the hitch in this detective mode.
I don't know what the upshoot of this sultanic sneeze will be, but I have written elsewhere that Goodwin's writing appeals more to the sense of smell than most crime fiction does. The olfactory is just a bigger factor for him than for most writers.
Oddly enough, I just watched a nature clip about dogs and was reminded once again of their ultra superior sense of smell. Even Jason Goodwin is an inferior specimen compared to your average labrador.
(Sorry, Jason.)
As fans of J.F. Englert and Randolph, you and I know how dogs smell.
No, wait. I mean you and I know that dogs smell good. Or well.
No, I don't mean that Yashim uses his sense of smell to compensate for what he has lost, I mean that Goodwin's writing appeals to the sense of smell, whether in the simple meals Yashim prepares for himself, or the factory (I don't remember if it's a dye works or a tannery or some other pungent place) where a chase happens in one of the books.
I just meant that Goodwin must have a good sense of smell to include it in his writing. Unfortunately, it can't be as good as Randolph's. Limitation of the species, I'm afraid.
Sights, sounds, smells of Istanbul do it for him, I guess. He hiked some great distance to Istanbul and wrote a nonfiction book about it, so he must like the city. Randolph might enjoy reading his books.
Peter, have you checked out the Rap Sheet recently? You might find the latest post interesting.
Thanks, and hey, you. Get off of my cloud.
From the looks of my result, the program gives recent words more weight, which makes some sense, I suppose.
Thanks, and hey, you. Get off of my cloud
Peter, I've never been a Rolling Stones fan but I recoginze the quotation. Cloud, my ass. Any back and forth through short sentences is liable to lead to misunderstandings. I'm sorry if my attempts at concision tend to be more confusing than enlightning.
But if you want to hit me where it hurts I'm more Led Zep that RStones
Above all I'm a DBB fan. Now, there's flattery for you!
I'm curious, though. What prompted that cloud reference?
"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide."
The program creates word clouds -- clusters of words arranged by size and, I think, proximity to the center of the diagram according to their pertinence -- for the terms or URL the user types in.
Thanks for the kind words, though, even if you were a little cloudy on the details.
DBB ROCKS. ANYTHING CLOUDY ABOUT THAT, PETER?
Whoa!
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