Pričaj im o bitkama, kraljevima i slonovima
In 1506, Michelangelo Buonarroti was invited by Sultan Bayezid II to design a bridge across the Golden Horn in Constantinople. Furious at Pope Julius II who had humiliated him and refused to pay, Michelangelo left Rome and arrived by ship in Constantinopl
In the city of two faiths and three continents, the artist encounters a completely different world: the scents of spices, hammams, court intrigues, poets singing in Persian, Armenian dancers, and a mysterious courtesan whose body is “like an unreadable script.” He falls in love with her (or with him?), and love becomes an obsession as dangerous as the political games between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe.
Michelangelo will never build that bridge (history records that the project failed), but in Constantinople he will find a new language of form, eroticism, and solitude. Énard masterfully interweaves real historical facts with fiction: he contrasts the melancholy of a Renaissance genius with the opulence of the Orient and shows how East and West are reflected in each other – attracting and repelling.
A short, dense novel about art born of exile, about love that knows no gender, and about bridges that remain only in dreams.
Two copies are available
