The Calligraphers' Night is a beautifully written fictionalised account of the author's grandmother's life, tracking her loves, her career and the changes in Turkey during the breakdown of the Ottoman empire and following. I found it captivating and would highly recommend it.

“God is not interested in the Latin alphabet,” says Rikkat Kunt, the narrator in The Calligraphers’ Night by the French-Lebanese author Yasmine Ghata. “His dense breath cannot skim across those squat, separate letters.”

The Calligraphers’ Night [is] a beautiful account of one woman’s complicated path to follow what was quite obviously a calling—and I use the word almost in its religious sense. It is the story of the creation of the woman, Rikkat, and the calligrapher, Rikkat Kunt, and the two are intertwined as elaborately as the vines and flowers that decorate the subject’s own work. The woman’s story is beautiful and compelling, of course. It is filled with a desire for love and the experience of loss, with men who disappoint her, children who are taken away from her and reconciled only years later, a society that does not regard her wishes or dreams as important.

But it is the calligrapher’s story—the artist’s story—that arrested me, and brought my early college days of struggling to write a passable copy of bismi-llāhi ar-raḥmāni ar-raḥīmi (“In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”) vividly before me. Every step in the process of writing becomes a point for meditation and reflection. Rikkat talks of her old teachers with the surety that their ghosts are still in the room, guiding her (night is a time for the visitation of spirits). She handles her instruments as though they were independent beings who may or may not decide she is worthy to touch them. She speaks often of her compositions as though they arrived through her hand, guided or gifted by the ghosts of calligraphers long dead. And what artist is not always reaching for, longing for, this moment of total submission to the work? When the brush or the pen or instrument seems to act on its own, fed directly from some creative spirit and bypassing conscious thought altogether? “I had to struggle like mad to hold back their need to make up for the wasted years,” remembers Rikkat on the day when she first used the tools left to her by the old master. “An impoverished concerto played itself out before my eyes: the qalam was a flute in my fingers, its support tried out its skills as an archer, and the paper became a musical score for the needs of all.”

Calligraphy, it turns out, is more like painting than writing. The act of preparing the paper, and mixing the ink (especially the coveted gold leaf used by illuminators to decorate the title pages of the Suras and other religious texts), of sharpening the qalam and preparing the work surface—all this is part of the final composition. Even the moment when the final stroke has finished, the pen lifted away and the paper laid aside to dry—even this is a step with significance. “Calligraphers never blow on the ink,” admonishes Rikkat, “accelerating this drying process is the same as expelling the divine presence.”

So this is why God is not interested in the Latin alphabet. Latin letters mean nothing until they are put into words. And then, they are only words. Information. “Content.” I had thought that calligraphy was the art of writing words beautifully. It is not. It is an act of prayer. read full review

This is a fictionalised version of the life of the author's grandmother, a famous calligrapher who learnt her trade shortly after Ataturk's language reform (which switched Arabic for Roman letters and "purified" Turkish vocabulary).

The book focuses on the creation of the calligraphy itself - sometimes under divine influence, sometimes under the guidance of the spirits of former calligraphers, and sometimes affected by her own emotions. It's an ornate, poetic book - sometimes overwhelmingly so. ( )

I can't believe this is a first novel. Ghata writes so beautifully and effortlessly. The translation by Andrew Brown is near perfect, too. ( )