In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

BookBrowse Reviews The Trojan War Museum by Ayse Papatya Bucak

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Trojan War Museum by Ayse Papatya Bucak

The Trojan War Museum

and Other Stories

by Ayse Papatya Bucak
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 20, 2019, 192 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2020, 192 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


A talented new voice in short fiction, Turkish-American author Ayşe Papatya Bucak explores her roots in ten stories rich with wit and deep feeling.

In her dazzling debut, O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Ayşe Papatya Bucak glides through the historical, the fantastical, and the mythological in stories that pay homage to her Turkish heritage while probing the depths of the human condition. The stories are funny, salient and wistful, often all at once, establishing the author as a maverick at the height of her powers.

The collection opens with the magical realism-tinged "The History of Girls," set in the immediate aftermath of an explosion in a Turkish boarding school dormitory. A first person narrator using the collective "we" describes the experiences of the girls buried in the rubble, "diamonds waiting to be dug out," as they hope for rescue, along with those who did not survive. The dead comfort the living, and the living comfort the dead. As the girls reflect on the lives they have had, and the futures they will never have, the author provides measured social commentary on the joys and the perils of Muslim womanhood.

In "Iconography," a young Turkish woman studying at an American university goes on a hunger strike for reasons that are inexplicable to herself and those around her, allowing each to posit their own interpretation—is she concerned about the environment? The plight of farmers? Poverty? Furthermore, should she be forced to eat if her health is at risk? Bucak imbues the story with a manic absurdity as the hunger strike evolves from an affectation to a serious crisis. Through the inclusion of a few alternate endings, the author ultimately allows the reader to choose not only their own interpretation of the young woman's actions, but what happens to her.

"Mysteries of the Mountain South" follows protagonist Edie as she moves to southwestern Virginia to care for her dying grandmother. Edie has just graduated from college and chooses to take on this task instead of moving to California for a lucrative coding job because she is feeling lost and unmoored after a bad breakup. As she gets to know her grandmother in a more authentic way, she also discovers herself in this remote Appalachian setting. Bucak then shifts gears for the remarkably inventive title story, which envisions eight different versions of the so-called "Trojan War Museum," beginning in the immediate aftermath of the war itself, and ending in the year 2145. The description of this final iteration is replete with imaginative, otherworldly details:

You can touch anything in the eighth Trojan War Museum; there are no glass barriers
or alarms or even guards to stop you. Though what you touch might burn or bite or
weigh on you. Sometimes what appears to be an ordinary sword turns out to be a piece
of someone's soul that once picked up cannot be put down.

The final story, "The Gathering of Desire," is set in Philadelphia in 1827, where a Quaker woman whose husband has recently disappeared (and is presumed dead) attends a carnival with her children and finds herself participating in a chess match with a large mechanical opponent called "the Ottoman Turk," operated from the inside by a chess master. When the woman learns that her husband's body has been found, she attempts to help her children cope with their sorrow while attending to her own grief, and the match becomes an elegant, sustained symbol of her resilience.

The Trojan War Museum is a unique balancing act, a testament to Bucak's ability to juggle multiple moods and themes in a way that corresponds with the reality of actual human emotion and captures the complexity of personal motivations. Death is not only sad; it inspires a constellation of feelings that spiral through the grief-stricken in fluctuating waves. People want to do good, but are invariably sidetracked by self-interest. This sophisticated understanding of human behavior, along with Bucak's exceptionally clever plotlines, elevate the collection to greatness.

Reviewed by Lisa Butts

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2019, and has been updated for the September 2020 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  Melungeons

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Trojan War Museum, try these:

  • Shit Cassandra Saw jacket

    Shit Cassandra Saw

    by Gwen E. Kirby

    Published 2022

    About This book

    Margaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny, warm, and furious stories of women at their breaking points, from Hellenic times to today.

  • Grand Union jacket

    Grand Union

    by Zadie Smith

    Published 2020

    About This book

    More by this author

    Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world.

We have 7 read-alikes for The Trojan War Museum, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...
  • Book Jacket
    The MANIAC
    by Benjamin Labatut
    The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is an ambitious work that falls squarely into the category of fiction...
  • Book Jacket: Blood Test
    Blood Test
    by Charles Baxter
    Brock Hobson is a loving single father, a Sunday School teacher, and an upstanding and honest ...
  • Book Jacket: The Barn
    The Barn
    by Wright Thompson
    The barn doesn't reek of catastrophe at first glance. It is on the southwest quarter of Section 2, ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

A library is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.