HELE HELE!
A beautiful monotone. A tastless delicacy.
I yearn to live in the mountain. I fantasize about diving in the sea. I want to inhale the temperature and wear the breeze like a blanket. However, only this lingers for me after finishing Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle. Her style confused the plot and my understanding of the characters. She has an incredible talent for words but I feel lacks the discretion on how to best use them. She overcrowds the events with her excessive insights into the characters and, honestly, I only have a vague idea of what happened and why.
I love navigating through the mountain interior with Kemal and Timur. Despite its claustrophobic elements, the light play and temperature descriptions provide a breathtaking sensory experience.
Settle expounds on the effects of the ex-patriate presence in Ceramos.
‘It is inside and outside, you see. A way we are taught to be and a way we are, two things. You do not do what the others do. They fall in love wiht our ways and when they find out some of us are as big son-of-a-bitches as anybody else, they get mad at us…It is unfair.’
Each character experiences Ceramos from their native or expatriate point of view and struggles to make sense of the interaction and transformation of the land. Some see the transformation as destructive and others as an evolution toward relevancy in the modern world. More importantly, do these perspective unite or divide the people of Ceramos? And does the city’s development ruin it or does the expectation of a certain experience by tourists and expats ruin it?
Settle has the ideas. Considering her time living in Turkey, she has the unique opporunity of describing the land and life from the perspective of an outsider. I feel she made my understanding and immersion into that experience more difficult with her style. Though technincally beautiful, it fails to engage me. And though she describes a delicacy in the Turkish setting, her lack of tactful stylistic choices loses me.
The Immersion Library 
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