Open up a world of Turkish inspiration with a Cornucopia digital subscription

Buy or gift a stand-alone digital subscription and get unlimited access to dozens of back issues for just £18.99 / $18.99 a year.

Please register at www.exacteditions.com/digital/cornucopia with your subscriber account number or contact subscriptions@cornucopia.net

Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital Edition

The Naked Orientalist

The Turkish Life of French Sailor and Writer Pierre Loti: A Novel

James Barrie

Published by Severus House

£10.99 / $14.35 / €13.13
($/€ approx)



Paperback, 252 pages, published March 2022
Book Description

Pierre Loti, a young French sailor, arrives in Salonika to witness the hangings of several Turks at the harbourside. He takes shore leave and behind the bars of a window by the mosque, he spies a young Turkish woman. He disguises himself as an Albanian and begins a love affair with this woman who he calls Aziyadé but whose real name was Hatijay. The romance continued in Constantinople that winter and ended when Loti got his orders to sail in March 1877. This was the beginning of his successful career as a writer and his lifelong love affair with Turkey.

Jonathan is an English language teacher in Istanbul in the late 1980s. When he discovers his flatmate Harry dead in the bath, the word ‘Loti’ written into the grime of the tiled wall and the book Aziyadé left open on his desk, his life takes an unexpected course.

Orhan, a young tea boy, encounters a strange foreigner dressed like a Turkish pasha accompanying a carriage carried through the streets of Constantinople. The carriage contains his aging guardian Khadija. He follows the group to the cemeteries beyond the city’s ancient walls, their destination: his mother’s grave.

The Naked Orientalist combines both historical and contemporary chapters to explore Loti, his Turkish lover Hatijay and his first book Aziyadé.

Related Books
Cornucopia Bookshop

Books

Back Issues

Music

Subscriptions

Cornucopia Digital Subscription

The Digital Edition

Cornucopia works in partnership with the digital publishing platform Exact Editions to offer individual and institutional subscribers unlimited access to a searchable archive of fascinating back issues and every newly published issue. The digital edition of Cornucopia is available cross-platform on web, iOS and Android and offers a comprehensive search function, allowing the title’s cultural content to be delved into at the touch of a button.

Digital Subscription: £18.99 / $18.99 (1 year)

Subscribe now