I rarely ever look at the back of a book before reading the entire book. When I picked up my book from the library, I was sitting in my car with the book in my lap, I picked it up haphazardly and it fell open to the back page titled Author's Note, it caught my eye so I began reading. I came home and clicked on our discussion in here, and lo and behold, we are discussing our family and friends evacuating their homes and being stuck in traffic,and also our comments about how the book cover was so striking to all of us.. Coincidental.... well, you decide. This is what I read:
Author's Note
I am not sure whether writers choose their subjects or whether their subjects somehow come to find them. For me, at least, it felt like the latter with The Architect's Apprentice. The idea for this novel emerged for the first time on one sunny afternoon in Istanbul, while I was inside a cab that was stuck in traffic. I was looking out of the window and frowning, already late for an appointment, when my eyes moved across the road to a mosque by the seaside. It was Molla Celebi, one of Sinan's lesser known beauties. a Gypsy boy was sitting on the wall next to it, pounding on a tin box that was turned upside down, I thought to myself that if the traffic did not clear any time soon, I might as well begin to imagine a story with the architect Sinan and Gypsies in it. Then the car moved on and I totally forgot the idea, until a week later a book arrived by post. It was Gulru Necipoglu's The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, sent by a dear friend. Inside the book, one particular drawing caught my eye: it was a painting of Sultan Suleiman, tall and sleek in his kaftan. But it was the figures in the background that intrigued me. There was an elephant and a mahout in front of the Suleimaniye Mosque; they were hovering on the edge of the picture, as if ready to run away, unsure as to what they were doing in the same frame as the Sultan and the monument dedicated to him. I could not take my eyes off this image. The story had found me.
While writing this book I wanted to understand not only Sultan's world but also those of the chief apprentices, workers, slaves and animals who were there alongside him. However, when one is writing about an artist who has lived as long ago, and produced as much, as Sinan, the biggest challenge is the reconstruction of time. It took from seven to nine years to finish a mosque, and Sinan constructed more than 365 buildings of various sizes. So, in the interest of narrative pace, I decided to jettison a strict chronological order and to create my own timeframe, with actual historical events absorbed into the new timeline. For instance, in reality, Mihrimah got married at the age of seventeen, but I wanted her to marry later, to give her and Jahan more time together. Her husband, Rustem Pasha, died in 1561; yet for the sake of the story, I wanted him around a bit longer. Captain Gareth is an entirely fictional character, but he is based both on European sailors who had joined the Ottoman navy, and on Ottaman sailors who had switched sides. Their stories have not yet been told.
It was a conscious decision to bring Takiyuddin into the story at an earlier point in history. In fact, he became the Chief Royal Astronomer at the time of Sultan Murad. But the trajectory of the observatory was important to me, so I shifted the date of Grand Vizier Sokollu's death. The painter Melchior and the ambassador Busbecq were historical characters who arrived in Istanbul around 1555, but I have fictionalized the moments of their arrival and departure. In several books I have come across allusions to a group of Ottoman architects in Rome, but what exactly they were doing there remains obscure. I imagined them as Sinan's apprentices, Jahan and Davud. And there really was an elephant named Suleiman in Vienna, whose story has been beautifully narrated by Jose Saramago in The Elephant's Journey.
Finally, this novel is a product of the imagination. Yet historical events and real people have guided and inspired me. I benefited enormously from a great many sources in English and Turkish, from Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq's Turkish Letters to Metin. And's Istanbul in the Sixteenth Century: The City, the Palace, Daily Life.
"May the world flow like water," Sinan used to say. I can only hope that this story, too, will flow like water in the hearts of its readers.
Elif Shafak
So, like this story found Elif, I too, feel her story found us! A book cover inspired her, as does the cover of her book, leaves us a bit in awe. We shall see if her story, "flows like water."
