The Arts Club at Home:
Author Reading and Novel Discussion
LOUIS MITLER
"The Snake That Did Not Bite: Nuriye's World"
Wednesday, July 15 at 3:00 pm
OPEN TO MEMBERS - FREE
An exotic multicultural novel by Louis Mitler, Arts Club of Washington member with an expertise in Turkish literature and culture.
“Let the snake that does not bite me live one thousand years.”
Ottoman Turkish proverb1973
The First Bridge opens in Istanbul, linking Asia and Europe. On her last night in her mansion overlooking the Bosporus, Ottoman aristocrat Nuriye reflects on the seventy years of Turkish and world history and the human conditions she has experienced. Born the daughter of a demoted but revered general, the motherless Nuriye is raised by a Bambara slave and an English governess.
Like the First Bridge, Nuiye’s life spans multiple cultures: the African religion of her nurse, the severe British strictures of her governess and the transition from the suffocating world of the late Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey. Nuriye manages to retain her personal integrity and her home through years of a childless and chaotic marriage and the efforts of her family to evict her from it.
Told over the course of a single day in seven tales, corresponding to the five canonical prayers of Islam and the night before and after them and spoken to a recording machine, whose tapes Nuriye compares to a snake, Nuriye’s life is itself a bridge from the Darkness Before the dawn to the Night After the Last Prayer. But it’s in the darkest hours that Nuriye wonders how the Snake of Destiny chooses its victims. Is her family under a curse as she’s often been told?
About the Author
Louis Mitler was born in Lexington, KY. He attended elementary and high school in Lexington and Miami Beach, FL. While on a visit to Turkey with family friends, in the midst of the Turkish Revolution of 1960, he became deeply involved in the culture and life of that country and returned there in 1965 to finish his undergraduate studies in the School of Letters (Edebiyat), Department of Philosophy. He holds an MA in History and a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY. He worked as Turkish Cataloger at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC for several years.
He studied Italian at Collegio San Damiano, Assisi, Italy for a year and has conducted research in the Archevium Segretum of the Vatican for his study on ‘”The Genoese of Galata,” Cambridge, 1979.
Mitler lived a total of seven years in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara, during which time be became acquainted with people of varying social classes and backgrounds who shared with him their outlooks on the history of their country and their own life experiences.
He is a translator of Turkish and Azerbaijani, a Life Member of the American Translators Association and Owner of TRS Translation Services, currently living in Charlottesville, VA and is the author of several reference books dealing with Turkish literature and the translator of contemporary Turkish authors.
The reading and discussion with the author will be live online via Zoom on Wednesday, July 15 at 3:00 pm. The event is free.
If you would like to read the novel before the event,
you can purchase it on Amazon.
