Aziyadé Reading Order

Aziyadé (1879) by Pierre Loti is his first novel and the book that made his reputation — a fictionalized account of his real love affair as a French naval officer in Ottoman Constantinople with a young Circassian woman from a harem, identified only by the title name. Loti (the pen name of Julien Viaud) spent time in Salonika and Constantinople during his naval service in the 1870s, and the novel is barely disguised autobiography: 'Loti' the French officer is concealed in a Turkish house in the Eyüp district with Aziyadé, with the complicity of her master's household, and the novel consists of his journals from this period interspersed with letters. The novel's achievement is the quality of its evocation of the Istanbul of the last Ottoman decades — the Golden Horn, the mosque interiors, the Bosphorus, the cafés, the Turkish domestic life — combined with a melancholy eroticism and a sense of fundamental cultural impossibility: Loti knows that this world is not his, that the love cannot last, and the novel is saturated with the awareness of imminent loss. Aziyadé ends with Loti's return to France, and a final supplementary chapter — 'La mort de Loti' — narrates how the fictional Loti returned to Turkey, took Turkish nationality, and died fighting in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, as if to join Aziyadé's world permanently in death. The novel established Loti's literary reputation and defined the French Orientalist novel for a generation.