3 ideas
Uzun İhsan Efendi, a seventeenth-century Galata mapmaker, becomes obsessed with the suspicion that the world is only a dream. He sets out to chart it in a book of 'misty continents.' Violence and greed play out around a man who doubts that any of it exists.
The book moves the question from whether the world is a dream to who is dreaming it and whether the dreamer is himself being dreamed. Once that is asked, 'real' and 'imagined' stop working as two separate categories and become a chain of nested points of view. Each character's reality depends on a consciousness above it that he cannot step outside of.
The novel is written in a made-up pastiche of archaic Ottoman prose, not the real language of the period. That invented idiom produces a stronger sense of historical authenticity than the actual record could. It also lets Western philosophical questions, such as Cartesian doubt, sound native to seventeenth-century Istanbul. The style is itself a small demonstration of the book's thesis: a convincing dream of the past can pass for the past.