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Title: Disenchanted by Pierre Loti ISBN: 0-8414-5886-3 Publisher: Folcroft Library Editions Pub. Date: June, 2006 Format: Textbook Binding List Price(USD): $39.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Disenchanted: a feminist book before feminism?
Comment: Written in 1906 by the famous French author-traveller-orientalist Pierre Loti, "Disenchanted" is about the distress of well-to-do young Turkish women of the beginning of the century secluded in their home's harems. The book is about an epistolar relation between a young and beautiful Circassian girl uprooted from her beloved country and brought up in Istambul, and a middle aged French author, André Lhéry, in whom we can easily recognize Loti himself. The reader is soon struck by the contradiction between the high, European-derived, material and intellectual standards of the young women, and the very strict and oppressive cultural context of their Muslim milieu. The cruelty of it all rests in the intellectual emancipation of these young women which brings them to a very clear consciousness of their dominated condition. The story then is about the exchange of views and ideas between Lhéry and three of these women (cousins), by letter and, occasionally, upon meeting secretly (and dangerously) in secluded spots in Istamboul. The love of Loti for the Orient, its people, and particularly the Asian shore of old Istambul is manifest in his elegant and subtle descriptions of the landscapes and districts of the city. The encounters with his three young friends are marked by humor, wit and subtle sensuality. We could even speak of an out-of-date eroticism, manifest in the unveiling of an eye or a few square inches of a pretty face. In this work, we find nostalgia, fatality, and a very interesting inside look into the Turkish culture of a century ago. But Loti's book is also a clear and explicit manifest for the emancipation of the Muslim woman, many years before feminism rose as a driving force in the West.