Songs My Mother Never Taught Me by Selcuk Altun is a bibliophilic enigmatic thriller set in modern Istanbul but steeped in ancient rites of surrender, vengeance, and absolution. The story tilts backwards and forwards between narrators and time, between victims and assassin, rising on the mist of the glorious Ottoman and Byzantine past and falling again with the hard modern whacking of detective novels, western education (and diplomas), and television.

What all the characters share is a love of books, all kinds of books, a reverence for literature (reverence that allows plagiarism as the highest compliment), and a background founded in Istanbul’s history as conqueror, voyeur, and connoisseur.  Wealthy young Arda shares narration with Bedirhan, orphan, soldier, and assassin of Arda’s father.  That the father deserved what he had coming is a question worthy of debate: Bedirhan believes all his victims — pederasts and pedophiles — deserve their fates and constructs events so that Arda can exact the fate deserving of his father’s killer.

Playing the role of a possibly evil, certainly interfering Puck is the author as a character himself, Selcuk Altun.  He first dabbles with Bedirhan, (who decries him as “the man whose books I’d swore I’d never read“) and then sets up the clues for Arda that lead him to uncover his father’s killer but most importantly, lead him to discover Istanbul all over again, and his own role and place in the city and in the story that is his own life.

Arda repeatedly describes Altun as “repulsive” but in the end is grateful for the writer’s interception in his life, re-writing his future and releasing him from his past.  Isn’t that what writers are supposed to do, allow us to envision a new future and forgive ourselves the past?  Altun does it with dry wit and grubby grace, and provides in Songs My Mother Never Taught Me a thriller that will keep book lovers giggling amidst the confusion of figuring out all the names and places and confessions and relationships and dalliances  and guilt.  The best news is the assurance that “there was a great library in purgatory for the gang of philosophers, poets, and writers.“  Filled with books like the ones I’ve read this year, I could take eternity in purgatory, no problem.