Nate D's Reviews > A Long Day's Evening

During a time of religious upheaval in the Byzantine Empire, two stories of monks climbing hills unfold roughly 50 years apart. The physical journey, for each, is a minor accompaniment to deep inner turmoil and self-analysis into the factors that motivate the major decisions of their lives. Each journey is one towards epiphany and self understanding, though these final realizations are quite different for each.

The construction here has a clever modernist bent, turning outward events into an atemporal crosscutting of pivotal moments that interrupt and interleave, mirroring the untidy patterns of thought. The actual content here is more single-minded -- everything here serves to explore these crises of faith and spiritual truth. It's more broadly interesting in that truth here is a personal one, separate from the orthodoxies of Church decrees that serve as inciting events. Rather, the specific validity of Church decrees matters much less than how the subject reacts to it, internally and externally. This perhaps says something simultaneously about the arbitrariness of religion, or societal law, and about what aspects of belief actually define one's character. Perhaps what one believes matters less than how one goes about believing it. So though I'm hardly an ideal reader for theological issues and wouldn't normally be drawn to such material, I suspect that Karasu's concerns are broader, both in thematic range and in the specific history he intends to address, given the massive changes that took place in 20th-century Turkey. More on that in the brief third part, perhaps the finest, and a worthy mid-20th-century twilight to lead into his superbly unsettling Night.