A shattered peace between Muslims and Christians

That rumbling sound just over the horizon is a stampede of giant novels set to arrive in a cloud of publicity. Pity the midlist author who pushes a new book into the path of this horde next month. To the extent Hollywood rises or falls on Thanksgiving weekend, publishers are concentrating more and more of their big literary novels in the fall, a self-destructive tendency sure to overwhelm the nation's shrinking body of readers (and newspaper book sections). If, as Calvin Trillin observed, the average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt, we're about to see some major spoilage.

That would be a shame because from the first novel to arrive this looks like a particularly good season. "Birds Without Wings," by Louis de Bernières, is a deeply rewarding work about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It's both exotically remote and tragically relevant in our age of confident nation-building.

As he did in his bestselling "Corelli's Mandolin" (1994), de Bernières roots his examination of the byzantine complexity of history in the life of a small town. For generations, Christians and Muslims have lived harmoniously in Eskibahçe, a fictional coastal village carved into a hillside in what we now call Turkey. The novel opens in 1900, on the eve of political and social calamities that no one could possibly imagine, least of all these simple folk, whose lives have more in common with 1500 than 1950.

One by one, they tell their stories - short, simple scenes that gradually cut new facets in the hard substance of world history. "With us there has been so much blood," Iskander the Potter says in the first paragraph, but it's easy to ignore that warning as he and his neighbors describe the everyday joys and trials of their lives as though these were the riffs of some Ottoman Garrison Keillor.

There's young Philothei, a Christian girl so beautiful she must wear a veil to quell quarrels in the town. And Ibrahim, her betrothed, who can "mimic the stupid comments of a goat in all its various states of mind." Karatavuk and Mehmetçik play among the hills, endlessly blowing their bird whistles and flapping their arms. The proud Christian priest accepts "offerings from Muslims who were anxious to hedge their bets with God by backing both camels." Ali the Snowbringer lives with his asthmatic donkey in the trunk of a tree. And Levon, the Armenian pharmacist, graciously helps the Muslim drunk who once assaulted him in the street.

These are often charming, even comic stories, but they're quickly forced to contend with stunning scenes of violence. "It is one of the greatest curses of religion," de Bernières writes, "that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbors who have loved each other into bitter enemies."

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