I had a hard time connecting to the characters but enjoyed the exploration of a marriage and the parallels of it to the world at large. ( )

Another novel abandoned out of boredom. I found the characters and their predicaments unconvincing either in terms of a novel or those of "real" life. Even the female protagonist's penchant for red wine (good Bordeaux or cheap domestic Turkish), although plausible on the face of it, didn't read as "true." And the nicknames, Flash for the female photographer and Wonderboy for her war correspondent boyfriend. Ugh!
The second star is due to one interesting passage regarding language: "Turkish, Alif had tried to explain to me again and again, has no free-standing prepositions, instead deploying an army of infixes and suffixes that make for an ever-mutating dictionary. Nearly every word is transformed by its relationship to every other word. It's a hard lesson for an English speaker to grasp. The world informed by Turkish syntax is not the English one, where solitary objects move through the sentence with little cause or effect. Turkish exists in a webbed landscape where relationships carry meaning and every noun is malleable." I might dispute the notion that English is a language of "solitary objects" but this passage at least piqued my interest. ( )

Kinda beautiful but also kinda too much navel-gazing with unresolved plots. I would have liked to have the time in Afghanistan expanded upon - those sections were written with such vigor compared to the listlessness mimicking the protagonist's restlessness whilst in Istanbul.

The end was too quick and without a true resolution. Like life, I suppose, but this isn't life - it's a paperback novel. ( )

Between the publications of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001) and Adios, Happy Homeland (2011), Menéndez published two novels, lived in Istanbul, ended her marriage, lived in Egypt as a Fulbright Scholar, and worked as a journalist. Loving Che (2003) and The Last War (2009), the former set in Florida and Cuba, the latter in Istanbul during the Iraq War, continue to explore the themes of the play between illusion and reality mediated by imagination and storytelling and the need to find one’s true self.

In The Last War, Flash, a photojournalist, is stranded in Istanbul awaiting a visa that will allow her to enter Iraq to join her war-correspondent husband, Brando. While there, she receives an anonymous letter claiming that her husband has been unfaithful (as Menéndez did about her war-correspondent husband, Dexter Filkins). The novel examines the unravelling of a marriage, but it also focuses on the personalities and motives of those who follow wars to bring images and stories to the rest of the world. As Flash wanders through Istanbul, she flashes back to other fronts in Afghanistan and Pakistan trying to connect her present self to her past experiences.

In an interview Menéndez has stated, “For me, leaving is the way we learn about identity and place. Travel far and long enough and you realize there is no such thing as a fixed ‘identity’ – though this is often so difficult a realization that we cling to the outlines of who we thought we were.” ( )

The Last War By Ana Menendez The narrator of the story is a photo journalist that travels with her writer husband, Brando, around the world chasing the latest war story. Always living on the edge, near the greatest danger. Their own suffering is a sort of sacrifice as if they too were in a war. Brando has traveled to Iraq and the narrator, his wife, whom he calls Tunes, is waiting for her papers to arrive to join him. She stays in their apartment in Istanbul waiting, and falls into a melancholy. She receives a mysterious letter detailing the facts of her husbands supposed love affair with another woman. She reignites a friendship with an old journalist friend that she suspects may have written the letter. This novel is loosely based on Ana Menendez's life experience. It is a poetic, sad and heartbreaking peek into a marriage. ( )