The Books: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” – ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

c7281.jpgStill excerpting the short story fairy-tale collection by AS Byatt (my favorite – obviously!) – called The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye – This excerpt is from the title story. And it’s the last story in the book. It’s a novella – and I remember the first time I read it. It gripped me slowly – it’s a bit slow to get going, but I trust Byatt, so I just go with it. Once I got to the end – (and I was lingering over the reading of it, by that point I never wanted it to end!) I was so invested in this story, and in these characters – that I found myself, 3 pages to go, sitting on a bench on the edge of Central Park – I was waiting for a friend – and I was so into the story, so so into it…that I was mentally willing my friend not to show up until I had finished. If my friend had walked up and I had 1 page to go, I would have been forced to say, “Great to see you! Hi! Just let me finish this story … I’ll be right with you.”

And – like with Possession – the last 3 lines pulsed with feeling, aliveness – and I found myself with tears rolling down my face. It was life-affirming. The story is life-affirming, and I LOVE her for writing it.

I highly recommend it!!! For me, it was slow in the beginning …so just know that, going in. But hang in there … the ending is awesome.

The story stars Gillian Perholt, an intellectual woman, a woman who lives in her head – a woman who is a “narratologist” – she travels the world, collecting stories and myths … she goes to conferences with other narratologists, all over the world. She gives papers. She speaks. The story opens – Gillian is in Turkey, for a story conference. First Ankara, and then Istanbul. She has been to Turkey before, and has a good friend – Orhan – another narratologist, who acts as tour-guide and friend. Gillian’s husband has left her for another woman, a younger model. Gillian has a couple kids, she’s in her 50s … and there’s a sadness there, although she loves her work. But there is something hovering on the edges of her consciousness – an awareness of her own death … and she feels such intense loss about it … It almost appears to her as an apparition at times, waiting in the back of conference halls for her.

So anyway. Here is Gillian. Not really in crisis – but you get the sense that all is not as it should be. She gives her paper at the conference. It’s on Patient Griselda, the tale nobody really likes in Canterbury Tales.

There are long sections where Gillian and Orhan sight-see. They go to Haghia Sophia. They go out to dinner. I was not sure where the story was going … until Gillian and Orhan end up at the Grand Bazaar. Gillian loves paperweights, and always buys one from whatever city she travels to. So she and Orhan go to a small shop (run by one of Orhan’s students) – and she is looking for a paperweight.

What ends up happening is the “paperweight” she buys is actually a container for a genie (or – the correct term, as I have also learned from my Arabian Nights reading: “djinn”) … Later, in her hotel room, she uncorks the bottle – and out comes a genie.

And the relationship between these two that follows is something you’ll just have to read for yourself. Like I said before, it’s life-affirming. The djinn is one of my favorite Byatt characters. And I relate to Gillian. I so so relate to her. The woman who lives in her mind. And what it feels like when that ice begins to crack, the cerebral armor – what it is like when an intellectual head-y woman gets into her body, into the physical. This, I would say, is one of Byatt’s main themes – and “Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is its clearest and most beautiful expression. I love this story!!

Here’s the excerpt where she picks out the bottle, unknowing that within lies … the djinn … who will so change her life.


Excerpt from The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye – “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”

Another of Orhan’s students had a little shop in the central square of the market-maze, Iç Bedestan, a shop whose narrow walls were entirely hung with pots, pans, lamps, bottles, leather objects, old tools whose purpose was unguessable, chased daggers and hunting knives, shadow-puppets made of camel skin, perfume flasks, curling tongs.

‘I will give you a present,’ said Orhan. ‘A present to say good-bye.’

(He was leaving the next day for Texas, where a colloquium of narratologists was studying family sagas in Dallas. Gillian had a talk to give at the British Council and three more days in Istanbul.)

‘I will give you the shadow puppets, Karagöz and Hacivat, and here is the magic bird, the Simurgh, and here is a woman involved with a dragon, I think she may be a djinee, with a little winged demon on her shoulders, you might like her.’

The small figures were wrapped carefully in scarlet tissue. Whilst this was happening Gillian poked about on a bench and found a bottle, a very dusty bottle amongst an apparently unsorted pile of new/old things. It was a flask with a high neck, that fitted comfortably into the palms of her hands, and had a glass stopper like a miniature dome. The whole was dark, with a regular whirling pattern of white stripes moving round it. Gillian collected glass paperweights: she liked glass in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth. Blown with human breath in a furnace of fire. As a child she had loved to read of glass balls containing castles and snowstorms, though in reality she had always found these disappointing and had transferred her magical attachment to the weights in which coloured forms and carpets of geometric flowers shone perpetually and could be made to expand and contract as the sphere of glass turned in her fingers in the light. She liked to take a weight back from every journey, if one could be found, and had already bought a Turkish weight, a cone of glass like a witch’s hat, rough to touch, greenish-transparent like ice, with the concentric circles, blue, yellow, white, blue, of the eye which repels the evil eye, at the base.

‘What is this?’ she asked Orhan’s student, Feyyaz.

He took the flask from her, and rubbed at the dust with a finger.

‘I’m not an expert in glass,’ he said. ‘It could be çesm-i bülbül, nightingale’s eye. Or it could be fairly recent Venetian glass. “Çesm-i bülbül” means nightingale’s eye. There was a famous Turkish glass workshop at Incirköy – round about 1845, I think – made this famous Turkish glass, with this spiral pattern of opaque blue and white stripes, or red sometimes, I think. I don’t know why it is called eye of the nightingale. Perhaps nightingales have eyes that are transparent and opaque. In this country we were obsessed with nightingales. Our poetry is full of nightingales.’

‘Before pollution,’ said Orhan, ‘before television, everyone came out and walked along the Bosphorus and in all the gardens, to hear the first nightingales of the year. It was very beautiful. Like the Japanese and the cherry blossom. A whole people, walking quietly in the spring weather, listening.’

Feyyaz recited a verse in Turkish and Orhan translated.

In the woods full of evening the nightingales are silent
The river absorbs the sky and its fountains
Birds return to the indigo shores from the shadows
A scarlet bead of sunshine in their beaks.

Gillian said, ‘I must have this. Because the word and the thing don’t quite match, and I love both of them. But if it is çesm-i bülbül it will be valuable …’

‘It probably isn’t,’ said Feyyaz. ‘It’s probably recent Venetian. Our glassmakers went to Venice in the eighteenth century to learn, and the Venetians helped us to develop the techniques of the nineteenth century. I will sell it to you as if it were Venetian, because you like it, and you may imagine it is çesm-i bülbül and perhaps it will be, is, that is.’

‘Feyyaz wrote his doctoral thesis on Yeats and Byzantium,’ said Orhan.

Gillian gave the stopper an experimental twist, but it would not come away and she was afraid of breaking it. So the nightingale’s-eye bottle too was wrapped in scarlet tissue, and more rose tea was sipped, and Gillian returned to her hotel. That evening there was a farewell dinner in Orhan’s house, with music, and raki, and generous beautiful food. And the next day, Gillian was alone in her hotel room.

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7 Responses to The Books: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” – ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (A.S. Byatt)

  1. Malibu Stacy says:

    This is my very favorite story of all time, and I, too, love Byatt for writing it and for giving me the wonderful word “horripilant” to describe that shivery sensation I adore above all others.

  2. red says:

    Stacy – Oh, I’m so excited to hear from someone else who loved this story as much as I did!!

  3. Malibu Stacy says:

    I’m going to have such a lovely afternoon anticipating rereading this story when I get home tonight. Thanks.

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  5. Mary says:

    What a pleasure to read comments from people who love the story as much as I do! I often find myself rereading sections of “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” when I need a pick-me-up. Elements of the story stay with the reader in a very sensual way, as if the words themselves take on scents, colors, textures. I love the way Byatt’s imagination is wedded to language so completely — that, I think, is the secret of her appeal for me.

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  7. Paul says:

    Was the Djinn really in her head like the boy when she was younger?
    Whatever a fascinating story.

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