Reading Azerbaijan: The Orphan Sky

Following Austria, the next stop in my reading around the world tour is Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan

I know nothing about Azerbaijan. There’s a movie I once watched that may have been set there, but then again, it might have been Armenia. I wasn’t even sure if the country is in Europe or Asia. But apparently, I’m not the only one who is uncertain about that. The WordfinderX global map of most popular books lists it as Europe and Read Around The World Challenge lists it as Asia. In fact, that East/West confusion is a lot of what Azerbaijan is about. The Wikipedia entry for the country opens with

Azerbaijan, officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and West Asia.^[9] 

Wikipedia

The territory that became Azerbaijan was ruled by various Persian empires until it was ceded to Russia at the beginning of the 1800s. It claimed independence during the Russian Revolution, becoming the first secular, Muslim-majority nation in the world. But two years later it was conquered by the new Soviet Union, and it remained a Soviet state until 1991. Although Azerbaijan became independent without a war, it has not had a peaceful history. Various regions of the country have fought separatist wars right up to the present day, with the most recent violent conflict in 2023. One of six independent Turkic states, Azerbaijan is once again a secular Muslim-majority nation.

Choosing the Book

The original Reading the World project used the 1937 book Ali and Nino, which may not have even been written by an Azerbaijani, but is often considered the national novel of Azerbaijan, with the East/West conflict at the heart of the book.

For each country, I try to choose a novel set in the country that is written by an author who:

• Is from that country
• Lived there while writing it
• Wrote in the language of the place
• Is female
• Is indigenous rather than descended from colonizers, where that distinction is relevant

I don’t think I’ve ever managed to meet all the criteria. I’m noticing a trend that I often end up reading women in exile who write in English instead. The Reader’s Room hasn’t reached Azerbaijan yet. Wordfinder X identified the most beloved, highest-rated book by an author from Azerbaijan as Days in the Caucasus, a memoir of childhood in Azerbaijan in the early 20th century by Banine. This meets most of my criteria and is very similar in concept to my Austrian choice, which worked really well for me. The Challenge website also suggested the novel set in the late 1970s, The Orphan Sky by Ella Leya, an Azeri American musician and writer. Also a good choice.

I checked the library website, and they had both books available as e-books only. I flipped a coin.

The Orphan Sky: A Novel

Like many first novels, The Orphan Sky follows an autobiographical outline of the author. Like the protagonist, Leila, the author grew up in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in the 1970’s under Soviet rule. A musical prodigy, the seeds of her disenchantment with communism were sown by her exposure to contemporary Western music, and a little record shop behind a green door.

But unlike the author, our protagonist is also the child of Soviet royalty; her father is a high-ranking Communist Party official. This puts her in a better position to view up close the corruption in the system, the lie that all citizens are equal under Soviet law, and even the mythical existence of the rule of law itself.

In the story, teenage Leila evolves from a true believer who is a little confused about the difference between her political convictions and her crush on cadre leader, to a woman who is passionately in love with a convicted dissident and well aware of the brutal nature of both her old crush and the system itself. As critical as the Soviet system is to the plot, The Orphan Sky is not just a reverse-propaganda story about politics.

It is a historical novel, a bildungsroman, and a romance, with a good balance of naturalism and drama. The characters are believable as human, even if they and the situations they find themselves in are a little extreme. A piano prodigy, Leila understands everything through art. Music, painting, and poetry are more important to her than poetry. She references movements of classical works to explain her feelings, describes passages of music in terms of color, and dedicates pages of internal monologue to her practice goals. The musical details could become tedious in other hands, but because the character herself makes little distinction between music and everything else, it effectively creates texture for the story and strengthens the unique, personal voice of the narration.

And best of all for my purposes, Baku itself is a major character.

Conclusion

As a Read the World book, The Orphan Sky was a perfect choice. The reader is only given a brief glimpse at the end of the modern city filled with skyscrapers that a contemporary tourist would find. But one gets a very good feeling for the world that city grew out of. We can almost smell the salt breeze off the Caspian Sea and feel the dust of decay from the pre-Soviet buildings lining crowded alleyways.

Leila navigates a complex web of political and cultural restrictions of her time. Baku in the 1970s has outwardly turned away from Islamic religion without abandoning conservative attitudes about gender roles that other Muslim countries had moved away from at that time.

Ella Leya is better known as a musician than a writer. The Orphan Sky, published in 2015, is her only book while she has released 10 albums as a composer and a short music film. But if she ever writes another book, I will read it.

Details

The Orphan Sky: A Novel
Ella Leya
English
Sourcebooks Landmark
359 pages