Under the Spell of a Dragon in Istanbul A Memoir Jill Pipkin 9780615508801 Books
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An American PhD student, Jill Pipkin, disillusioned with research physics, quits her academic program, and splits from her husband. She joins the Peace Corps but finds it too confining. After seeing postcards of beautiful mosaics and Islamic tiles in ancient Istanbul, she travels to Istanbul to photograph them. But Istanbul is a scary place for a young single woman. She is preparing to leave for Iran when she happens across a postcard of a mysterious and exotic ancient hybrid dragon. Mesmerized by its strange image she goes to see it at the Museum of the Ancient Orient. But the museum is closed for renovation. A young man invites her into the museum to see the dragon. He offers to help her find the mosaics and tiles. then invites her to a special dinner and offers her raki, a strong licorice liquer. It has a powerful aphrodisiac effect on her; she seduces him, leading to a life-threatening situation.
Under the Spell of a Dragon in Istanbul A Memoir Jill Pipkin 9780615508801 Books
I met Jill Pipkin, the author of “Under the Spell of a Dragon in Istanbul,” at a CA Writers Club meeting. When she said she’d been in Istanbul in 1972, I jumped up and said “I was, too.” So we talked after the meeting and I got her book. I wanted to compare her story with my own experience in Istanbul.Her story was interesting, exciting, and extremely personal. I found we shared some of the same experiences as young women in Turkey. We were both harassed by men everywhere who assumed the worst by our clothing and open naïve greeting. We both had intense, romantic relationships with a Turk. She lived on her own and had experiences I hadn’t had, since I was there for a longer period working a daily teaching job. But we were both affected by our time and our relationships in Istanbul. We both carried our experiences for the rest of our lives. However, Ms. Pipkin wrote a book about her memoirs and I have yet to do that.
This isn’t a young adult story, but it was written by a young woman in a very different time in a Muslim country. Things have changed a lot since we were both there in the 1970s. But the flavor, images, and ‘color’ of the city is there in her story. I’m glad I read it. I recommend it to history, art, and museum enthusiasts and to people interested in personal cross cultural experiences and relationships. There is so much about Istanbul that is interesting and exciting. And there’s a forbidden love story here, too.
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Under the Spell of a Dragon in Istanbul A Memoir Jill Pipkin 9780615508801 Books Reviews
Jill Shannon, a former physics major co-ed at Berkeley, attractive and adrift, decides to seek adventure in a treasure hunt for Turkish mosaic art she'd read about, including the famous blue mosque. She packs her thrift-store clothes, short pink skirt, and puts on he Dr. Scholl's sandals and flap-flaps her way onto a bus in Bulgaria. It's summer of '72. The communist border officials, leering at the obviously American morsel with no male escort, require bribes or other less appealing favors. Oblivious to the dangers, she's steadfast on her journey, slapping the faces that ask for it, winding up in a broken down hotel in Istanbul. She finds she can't safely navigate the streets. It's all crowded with staring, bearded men of a vastly different culture. She's aghast.
A local architect befriends her. He's attuned to her welfare--or so we think--helping greatly in the search for the city's art treasures. While getting around the dangerous poor side of town, he becomes her dragon, the man who is polite, doesn't smoke, and has a huge nose. They become passionately entangled.
It's a great road story and a love story. I'm a slow reader, but I read this one amazingly fast. Her true-to-life directness, impatience, and rush to her goals is so American. Yet she has her own unique ways. The memoir is written with style and includes details so vivid, she must have made meticulous entries in her diary, that is, on those nights she wasn't with her dragon, up until dawn knocked out by Turkish tequila.
Alas, she learns her man is hiding something. Through Pipkin's writing, I feel I am there, the heat of emotional turmoil, the breezes of exotic big cities, discovering a culture with one foot stuck ten centuries back.
It could be said that this book is a travelogue and love story. But putting it that way misses the whole point. The author has chosen to live her life in a certain manner and this book explores the intricacies of the choice. It can even be said to be a primer on living that way.
There are two ways to live one's life. The first, and most common, is to live so that you are here and life is out there. Pretty safe. The main danger is that you ay go to your grave never having really lived. The second choice is to become enmeshed with life in an embrace which is, at once enlivening, but also can inflict you with disappointment, pain, and regrets.
The story this book tells begins on a barren, dusty lot on the Bulgarian-Turkish border in 1972, where a bus has stopped so that the border guards can mistreat the passengers. The bus is heading to Istanbul, Turkey. The author, thirty-four at the time is an attractive young American woman traveling alone, a circumstance practically unheard of in that place and time. Why is she on the bus? What led her here?
The author was an adventurous spirit to begin with. As a teenager, she took a bus from Florida to Wyoming. Even younger, she took a bus across Cuba. She was in the Peace Corps. She studied French in Switzerland and had a love affair there. A crossing point in her life came when she went to school in Berkeley-Math and physics as an undergrad and physics in grad school. It was the sixties and she was caught up in the hippie scene, with all that entails. She married her friend Stephen Shannon who, in time, got his PhD but was quite sickly. During the period the story takes place, Stephen was working on the divorce papers-the two of them remain very good friends-BFFs. But something was churning within her. From her youth, she had an inclination toward art and now she chose to give up school, give up physics and math, give up the hippie generation, and enjoy life in ways that touched her soul now, not later. She had an interest in Middle-Eastern artifacts, particularly tiles and mosaics to be found in the mosques, temples, and museums. She packed her bags, including her two most important items-her camera and her Dr. Scholl's sandals- and headed of to Istanbul, Turkey, with a quite limited budget.
She spent her days walking the streets of Istanbul in her short, pink dress, which single women, particularly singe, attractive American women just do not do! On the way to visiting the mosques, churches, and museums where she could see and photograph her beloved tiles and mosaics she had many exciting and, sometimes dangerous, experiences.
The author had no interest in love or marriage at this time but a chance meeting with a prominent Turkish architect led to an intense courtship and love affair. She gave her heart to this man. Fully. The way life is sometimes it didn't work out and she left Istanbul for Tehran, carrying with her the never-ending pain.
The book is a page-turner and I highly recommend it.
Note that this review has been shortened from the original. To get the complete text ask at ralphrapp@yaho.com.
I met Jill Pipkin, the author of “Under the Spell of a Dragon in Istanbul,” at a CA Writers Club meeting. When she said she’d been in Istanbul in 1972, I jumped up and said “I was, too.” So we talked after the meeting and I got her book. I wanted to compare her story with my own experience in Istanbul.
Her story was interesting, exciting, and extremely personal. I found we shared some of the same experiences as young women in Turkey. We were both harassed by men everywhere who assumed the worst by our clothing and open naïve greeting. We both had intense, romantic relationships with a Turk. She lived on her own and had experiences I hadn’t had, since I was there for a longer period working a daily teaching job. But we were both affected by our time and our relationships in Istanbul. We both carried our experiences for the rest of our lives. However, Ms. Pipkin wrote a book about her memoirs and I have yet to do that.
This isn’t a young adult story, but it was written by a young woman in a very different time in a Muslim country. Things have changed a lot since we were both there in the 1970s. But the flavor, images, and ‘color’ of the city is there in her story. I’m glad I read it. I recommend it to history, art, and museum enthusiasts and to people interested in personal cross cultural experiences and relationships. There is so much about Istanbul that is interesting and exciting. And there’s a forbidden love story here, too.
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