The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye was published by Chatto & Windus in 1994. The collection contains five stories, all working within fairy-tale and mythological traditions, but the title novella — at nearly 150 pages — is the collection’s center of gravity.
Dr. Gillian Perholt, a narratologist (a scholar of story structure), is attending a conference in Ankara and Istanbul. She is fifty-five, recently divorced, an expert in the patterns of fairy tales — including the story of the djinn in the bottle and the three wishes. In her Istanbul hotel room, she purchases a nightingale-shaped glass bottle and opens it; a djinn emerges. He is vast, ancient, handsome, and bound to grant her three wishes.
The genius of the story is Gillian’s response: as a scholar of wish-stories, she knows that all wish narratives end in disaster — wishes are always misused, always produce unintended consequences. Her scholarly knowledge makes wishing genuinely difficult: she understands the structure of desire better than anyone and therefore cannot desire naively. Her wishes, when she finally makes them, are modest, specific, and profoundly moving — the desires of a middle-aged intellectual woman rather than a fairy-tale protagonist.
Collecting The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30