Despite a long and rich literary tradition, little Turkish fiction seems to have made much impression abroad until the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) in 2006. A recent surge of translation has, however, made clear that a great deal of interesting literature has emerged in Turkey in recent decades.
Among the best-known Turkish authors is the poet Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963). His epic novel in verse, Human Landscapes from My Country (1967, English 2002), written while he was imprisoned in the 1940s but published posthumously, is a remarkable achievement, delivering on the promise of its title. Its cast of several hundred characters from all walks of life offers a panorama of personal stories and experiences regarding Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s (1901–1962) novel
A Mind at Peace (1949, English 2008), which opens with World War II already looming, is tightly focused on a specific era and place. He depicts Turkey as a country that has been undergoing a radical transformation under Kemal Atatürk after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. His characters talk often about the nature of Turkishness and the possibilities for the nation.
A Mind at Peace is also about Istanbul and tries, above all else, to be evocative, though Tanpınar’s language can be excessively ornate. In
The Time Regulation Institute (1961, English 2001, 2013), Tanpınar contrasts Ottoman times with the uncertainties faced by modern Turkey, and it is filled with nostalgia.
The Time Regulation Institute is also a humorous satire of the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state, with the institute of the title charged with making sure that time is kept properly and uniformly throughout the nation.
Yashar Kemal (1923–2015), the first Turkish author to be widely translated into English, writes politically and socially engaged fiction that is often centered on the lives of Turkish peasants. His most famous creation is Memed, the hero of his two-volume 1955 work translated as Memed, My Hawk (English 1961) and They Burn the Thistles (English 1973) (two later sequels have not yet been translated). Even as a boy, Memed tries to flee the oppressive landowner whose control over the local villages is absolute. When he finally makes good his escape, he becomes a brigand and lives as an outlaw on the fringes of society. With his passion for justice, complicated by the lifestyle he has had to embrace and the vengeance he seeks, Memed is a wonderful fictional creation. A trilogy that features another peasant hero, Long Ali, begins with The Wind from the Plain (1960, English 1963). These novels also describe the daily struggles of Turkish peasants, for whom picking cotton is their main source of income. Yashar’s leftist politics occasionally intrudes too much in his fiction, as his portraits of the ruthless exploiting class can be almost cartoonish, but he nonetheless vividly captures both countryside and people.
Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk’s (b. 1952)
The Black Book (1990, English 1994, 2006) is not his first novel but perhaps is his most representative. In it, Rüya, the wife of the lawyer Galip, disappears, and he becomes obsessed with the idea that the newspaper columnist Celâl has something to do with it. Celâl also has disappeared, and in his search for his wife, Galip increasingly assumes Celâl’s identity, eventually even writing his columns. The chapters of the novel alternate between Galip’s quest and Celâl’s columns, which allows Pamuk to intersperse personal essays on a wide variety of esoteric subjects in an almost metaphysical mystery. This dense and mystic mix is the clearest expression of most of Pamuk’s interests and talents.
Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (1998, English 2001) is yet another twist on the mystery novel. It begins with a murder and, among the many voices narrating parts of the story, is the long unidentified killer’s. The novel is set in the late sixteenth century and centers on a group of painters at the Ottoman court who have very different ideas about art and the representation of reality. Western theories and methods—including the use of perspective—threaten age-old traditions, and the role of art itself is questioned. Combining court intrigue, religious intolerance, and questions of artistic freedom, My Name Is Red raises issues that seem more relevant than ever, especially with regard to Islam and its reach into personal lives and the public sphere.
Pamuk’s Snow (2002, English 2004) takes place in contemporary Turkey. The conflicts between Kurds and Turks used to be the major source of tension in Kars and the rest of the country’s far east. Now it is Islamists and their demands for a return to greater religious fundamentalism that are Turkey’s biggest provocations. The central figure in Snow is a poet named Ka, and one of his reasons for coming to this region is to investigate why so many local girls are killing themselves. A snowstorm cuts off Kars from the rest of the country, adding to the claustrophobic and isolated feel of the novel and making the town a more obvious microcosm of the country as a whole. As in all of Pamuk’s novels, the interplay between reality and art plays a major role, as does questions of identity, both personal and national.
The narrator in Pamuk’s
The Museum of Innocence (2008, English 2009) is Kemal, who falls deeply in love with a distant relative, Füsun. He is about to get engaged to someone else when he falls for her, and by the time he is free again, Füsun is married, so for most of the novel they are only friends rather than true intimates. Set in Istanbul in the 1970s and 1980s, Kemal becomes a collector, filling his “Museum of Innocence” with everyday artifacts that are meant to allow him to hold on to each precious moment of the present. He takes this to great extremes—eventually his collection holds 4,213 butts of cigarettes smoked by Füsun—but his insistence on holding so firmly to the past also prevents him from building a future.
The Museum of Innocence is as much about the Istanbul of that time as about the characters and the city lovingly described and reflected in the bits and pieces archived in Kemal’s museum—and, indeed, in Pamuk’s own, as he actually built a museum where many of the artifacts from the novel are on display.
With their multiple narrators and perspectives, Bilge Karasu’s (1930–1995) novels are anything but straightforward. Night (1985, English 1994) depicts a dark and opaque world filled with a sense of Kafkaesque menace. Consisting of 110 chapters, few of which are longer than a single page, Night is a novel of willful confusion in which Karasu does not allow the reader any sense of certainty about the encroaching terrors. The author also is a presence in the book, commenting on the writing—and undermining it—in a series of footnotes to the narrative. Similarly, the author steps forward near the end of The Garden of Departed Cats (1979, English 2003) to discuss how he went about writing that novel. The Garden of Departed Cats is told in chapters that alternate between the story of a visitor to a city who participates in a ritual game resembling human chess that pits locals against tourists once every decade, and a variety of apparently unconnected tales. The novel is often overwritten, and Karasu’s playfulness can be frustrating. Karasu also uses a variety of perspectives in the thirteen chapters of the coming-of-age novel Death in Troy (1962, English 2002). This is his most approachable work, showing how the central figure, Mushfik, comes to terms with the relationships in his family and his homoerotic desires in 1950s Turkey. In all his novels, Karasu’s lyrical use of language both impresses and leads to an opacity that can make the texts difficult to enjoy.
Elif Shafak (b. 1971) wrote her first novels in Turkish, including
The Flea Palace (2002, English 2004). The rundown Bonbon Palace, an apartment building in Istanbul, provides the novel’s structure, with the narrative moving between the flats in the stories of the various tenants in a work that resembles both Georges Perec’s
Life A User’s Manual and the
Arabian Nights. The Flea Palace’s entertaining cast of characters makes for a larger-than-life miniature of Istanbul and Turkey.
KEEP IN MIND
• Orhan Kemal’s (1914–1970) realist works rely heavily on dialogue to create an atmosphere and convey what his characters are suffering through. Although his protagonists have difficult lives, his often bleak tales nonetheless contain a consoling humanism.
• Asli Erdogan’s (b. 1967) The City in Crimson Cloak (1998, English 2007) is an evocative city portrait with an unusual mix of cultures. The Turkish protagonist Özgür finds herself down and out (and trying to write a novel entitled The City in Crimson Cloak) in Rio de Janeiro.
• Latife Tekin’s (b. 1957) fiction is close to standard magical realism, even though she consistently deals with the social tensions of a rapidly developing society in novels such as Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1984, English 1993), a portrait of a self-contained society that has been built on top of a large urban garbage dump. The novel is a creative parable of a community arising from the dregs of society and demonstrating human resilience and resourcefulness.
• Selçuk Altun’s (b. 1950) novels have soap opera–like titles—Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (2005, English 2008) and Many and Many a Year Ago (2008, English 2009)—but are surprisingly thoughtful thrillers.
• Mehmet Murat Somer’s (b. 1959) Hop-Çiki-Yaya series, which begins with The Kiss Murder (2003, English 2008), features an unnamed transvestite narrator who is both a nightclub owner and a computer specialist and dabbles in criminal investigation. Not nearly as camp as the premise might suggest, Somer has lots of fun with the milieu in this light but enjoyable crime series.
Since 2002, Shafak has also been writing in English. Her most controversial work is the novel
The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), which was released in its Turkish translation in 2006 and resulted in charges being filed against her under Turkey’s notorious article 301, which makes it a crime to denigrate Turkey or Turkish institutions. Telling the story of two families, one Turkish and one Armenian American, Shafak delves into Turkey’s unresolved history at the beginning of the twentieth century, when more than a million Armenians were killed in what is widely considered genocide. A lively novel with several strong female characters, Shafak’s overblown language and approach are too much at odds with her serious intent.
The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004), describing the cross-cultural confusions of three foreigners attending graduate school in the United States, is a lighter work in which it is easier to make allowances for Shafak’s uncertainties in her ambitious use of the English language.