The Bellini Card

Greg Stewart

I found The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin to be a riveting novel.  I had trouble putting it down once I started it.  I loved the style of his writing.  He set it up very much like a play and then referred to the action in the novel as a theater with the character Yashim.  I loved how the scenes were short yet contained vital information in almost every one.  I found it to very much reflect the style of film noir; with lots of love, murder, and tension between the characters.  I loved the dark themes mixed in with the historical and political ideas that were woven through.  I found it very interesting to see a Polish man working with a Moor in Venice to find something for the Sultan. It is not the most common group of characters I have ever read about. I found the mixtures to clash and click in just the right ways to create suspense throughout the novel which kept me hooked.

I think I enjoyed the relationship between Yashim and Palewski to be the most interesting.  I found their banter to be comical yet on point with the seriousness of the situation. I think the ideas that each embodied worked together very well to make the reader think about how all of these groups of people actually interacted in the time period.  If there was actually a Polish man posing as an American in Venice and how the Venetians would actually treat an American compared to a Moor, the actions would not have been as dramatic as they were in the novel.  This fact actually adds to the novel because it amplifies the effect of the author's style.  It feels like an American movie about espionage more than it feels like a novel about the relations between Istanbul and Venice.  Although I really loved the way that they painted the relationship between the two cities.  It was cool to see how most of the characters could trace back their heritage to a certain class from the past that determined their role in the time of the story.  I found the idea that Istanbul and Venice could be so similar yet so different to be one of the most eye-catching parts of the novel.  Both Palewski and Yashim mention how they felt very homesick at times and then later they say how they feel very much at home in Venice because it is so much like Istanbul.  I liked how they ended on that note too.  In one of the last chapters when Yashim and Palewski are talking about the differences and Yashim says that Venice would be better with muezzins, even though it is not the most important point in the novel, it shows how the people from Istanbul would like to see the world work, which is eveidently different from those who live and grew up in Venice.