Seven Houses : A Novel by Alev Lytle
Croutier
Unique And Fabulous
From internationally acclaimed author Alev Lytle Croutier, Seven Houses
chronicles the lives of four generations of remarkable women, sweeping
readers from the last days of the Ottoman monarchy to Turkeys
transformation into a republic and the present-day backlash. It is the saga
of a silkmaking family as told through the houses they occupied. From a
grand villa in Smyrna in the early twentieth century to a silk plantation in
the foothills of Mount Olympus, from a tiny house in a sleepy town to an
apartment in a modern urban high-rise, the familys dwellings reflect its
fortunes rise and fall. As communal baths and odalisques give way to
movies and cell phones, four unique yet powerfully linked women
experience all of lifes hardships and pleasures.
Personal Review: Seven Houses : A Novel by Alev Lytle
Croutier

When Stories Are Harder to BearI like a book that will speak with me of
spider webs, nightingales, an Adonis tree, even the blinding of a fox
named Scheherazade. What really lives inside an egg of Amber? Where in
the world is Smyrna? How does kismet devour the apple of a person's
other plans for their life? For the last 10 days, afraid to have it end too
soon, I have been lost in the so specific genius of Alev Lytle Croutier and
her "Seven Houses." I slowed myself to a reader's crawl, all through these
opening days of cold and Parisian rain. I've been basking in the vaporous
warm hammam of its pages, and I did not want it to end. I wanted a world
of a thousand nights and petals and the third eye of houses who may
speak as witnesses to history, and tell me secrets I could never know, or
invent. Maybe I wanted to escape this week's news reports of a world I no
longer dare to understand. Of couse I did. And I wished to hear, with a little
gentleness, of that region of the globe that I, or many, misapprehend. What
may it have been like, once upon a time, in lands that border Iran and
Iraq? What kind of women were growing up, there? I wanted to learn it
through the pen of a wise and mysterious writer. So I found her.Croutier is
a story teller extraordinaire, and more. And she is a most useful kind of a
poet, and more. When language is exalted by story and story is exalted by
language, "quel plaisir." Get the point? I loved it.Read "Seven Houses,"
and dream with its veils and its unveiling. Read it and discover a family you
might not wish for your own, but one you want to pursue through its
emergence - from a time when story counted for everything, to a time
when the stories are harder and harder to bear.
Margo Berdeshevsky/ Paris/ October, 2002
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