JTL

Journalof

Turkish Literature

ORIqAN PAMUK SPECIAL ISSUE

Bilkent University Center for Turkish LiteratureIssue 7 (2010)

Ankara

J

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND PLACE:

Azade Seyhan's Tales of C.ossed Destinies

Robe,¢ P. Finn

Seyhan, Azade. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in aComparative Context. New York: The Modern Language Association of America,2008.

The variegated visions of Turkey presented to the world by Nobel Prize-winner Orhan

Pamuk may have been up to now most of what it knows of the Turkish novel, but

Azade Seyhan has remedied that in this literate, comprehensive, and incisive text that

carries the reader through Turkish novels of the last century in what she calls %

dialogue across time". For her, the Turkish novel is not a paradigmatic shift in literature,

or even one wkhin itself, but rather--with the exception of -village literature (kÿ

edebiyalz)--a thematic continuum. Seyhan carries out her discussion by examples and

explanations that not only provide a detailed spectrum of the Turkish novel in the 20ÿa

century, but firmly ally its approaches, concerns, and conclusions to the texture of other

literatures, establishing Turkish authors and literary concerns in the wider context of

world literature. Her title thus operates on two levels, referring to Turkish novels as a

continuum, and also to the multidimensional affinities between Turkish novels and their

counterparts in other societies.

That this is the stated purpose of this valuable book commissioned by the

Modern Language Association does not diminish its achievement. The book is part of

the World Literatures Reimagined series, which has as its goal treatments of world

literatures by experienced scholars with a wide audience in mind. Azade Seyhan, who is

a professor of German and Comparative Literature at BtTn Mawr, was an excellent

choice, as her examination of Turkish novels is intentionally and essentially rooted

deeply in the context of a broad background. The book is a commentary both on

© 2010 Bilkent University Center for Turkish Literature JTL 7 (2010): 140-151

ROBERT IJ. FINN

Turkish literature and on Turkey, as she does not hesitate, like the painter of an Oriental

miniature, to step outside the bounds of the text when it is necessaU for a cloud to float

off a page or a horsed warrior to gallop into space. Her text is thus enriched by her

observations, as well as by allusions and comparisons to other literatures in time and

place that help us to see Turkish novels as both suigeneris and part of a whole, the very

combination that is a main subject of Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

The reader will learn not only about Turkish literature, but about German

literature, and particularly German Romanticism, as well. For those unfamiliar with the

latter, Seyhan's work will prmdde an enriched commental3' that helps to frame the

Turkish novel and to place it in a context that establishes its intellectual validity without

alleging a causality, as has been the case with French literature and the early Turkish

novel. In this, she develops her point that the Turkish novel is not a simple derivation

or "belated" expression, but one which proceeds from the unique Turkish experience

and cultural-linguistic synthesis. One of the main loci of her exatnination is the work

and thought of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpmaz, who stood at the border between the Ottoman

past and the modernist future and examined in tÿs writings the dualit3T of the Turkish

experience. It is he who apprehends, in his works, the muldfaceted trope of, especially,

the cit3ÿ of Istanbul that would later inspire and inform the work of Orhan Pamuk. Both

writers are prime exponents of Seyhan's view that "literature is an institution par

excellence of memoiff'(2). For her, the Turkish novel is a "dialogue across time", and all

Turkish literature with the aforementioned exception of the village literature schoolÿ

has shared themes. One could easily include village literature as well in the dialogue, and

make allusions and analogies in a wider ranging study of the Turkish novel that would

extend and inform her thesis. However, Azade Seyhan, who points out that there is not

a general study of the Turkish novel available for Western readers, is constrained by the

pedagogical aspect of her project from making that kind of broad ovelwiew. She has

chosen to work xxdth a specific number of novels, selected carefully to represent

different aspects and concerns o£ the Turkish novel and to reference and associate them

with counterparts in other literatures. In this, she deals closelywith structural and

developmental concerns of the novel as an art form, so that her work is less the kind of

sociological study that has characterized man), examinations of the Turkish novel and

more one dealing with authorial approaches, levels of expression and metaficdons, and

narrative and aesthetic forms, in which she finds the intellectual correlatives between the

Tm'kish novel and novels from other societies that also manifest xxdthin theft" individual

renderings the organic and metaphysical consciousnesses underl}dng the art of the age.

In this, she points out the currents of thought and perception, formed and guided by

Book Rexdew-JTL 141

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND 13LACE:AZADE SEYHANÿS TALgS OF CROSSED DESTINIES

the earth of human experience that transcend individual rendering. For example, the

first collections of Romantic poetry in modern Greek and Ottoman Turkish both

appeared in 1885, both bearing the name "The Tomb". Coincidence, yes, but more than

that.

The book is designed to be helpfi,d to the initiate as well as stimulating to the

informed. Seyhan raises numerous questions in the course of her inquiry to which she

intentionally does not supply ready answers. In other cases, her points elicit inquiries

from the reader, as when, for example, after a discussion of Schlegel and Romanticism,

she refers to Yd&z Ecevit's assertion in her Tiirk Romanmda Pos*modernist Aÿlm¢lar

(Postmodernist Initiatives in the Turkish Novel) that Turkish writers first encountered

Romanticism in the post-modernist phase in which we fred ourselves. One immediately

thinks of Samipaÿazade Sezai's Se*giizeit, Narmk Kemal's Inlibah, and others of the early

period that give one pause on this point. Thereby, the book opens the doors of

discussion, which it proceeds to do on a variety of inclusive levels. Proceeding from

Milan Kundera's apt observation about small nations "secluded behind their inaccessible

languages", 8eyhan notes that the approach has been, as Pamuk observed, one of

sociology and politics, and that it is time for a change. The Turks are not a small nation, =

but linguistic and cultural barriers have effectively excluded their literature from the

cultural discussion of Europe. This boolÿ is designed to alleviate this, at least in part,

and, through helpful allusions to many different world literatures, asserts the universality

of the Turkish novelistic experience while at the same time demonstrating Tanpmar's

prediction: "We shall meet the world concert with our national identity" (qtd. 16).

The Turkish novel is both part of the whole and an entity of itself. If Orhan

Pamuk's metafictions provide many different ways of viewing his society--some more

approachable to foreign readers than to Turkish readers who would prefer their

introspection in French or English capsules--he is by no means the only artist who

captured the variety of vision and reality that makes Turkey such a fascinating subject.

The reduction of the discussion to Turkish vs. European, a basically monochromatic

duality, has been and aIas, here as weÿcondnues to be an approach which overlooks

the much richer compleÿty of the culture that informs and has shaped modern Turkey.

One has only to refer to the work of historians such as Heath Lowry to see some of the

strands that have bound together to create the texture of Turkey. The tensions and

syntheses implicit in this texture are the subject of most of the books Seyhan has chosen

for discussion. \Vhat she wanted to do was to point out "the consistency xvith which the

novel reflects on what has unfolded in the social and cultural world outside it" (17).

142 JTL - Book Review

ROBERT P. FINN

In order to do this; she provides two chapters of background on the

development of the novel in Europe and Turkey and the historical and political context

in which change took place and continues to take place in what is now Turkey. Her

surveys (for that is what they are) give a clear, simple delineation of two very complex

subjects. She tries to steer her way through the minefields inherent in such an approach,

and does so rather welt, although there will be maW raised eyebrows from adherents of

one side or the other. This is particularly true in the current polarized intellectual

atmosphere in Turkey, where highly charged political and intellectual rhetoric

characterize a dynamic society in the midst of rapid change. Seyhan has her own

opinions, which she places on the desk for the reader to accept or reject. Her opposition

to Islamic fundamentalism is dear, particularly in the section on Re,at Nuri Giintekin's

1928 Green Night, which she compares with contemporary novels from Algeria and

Afghanistan that ÿiddress the same subject. She also notes that modernist reforms,

imposed from above, failed to reach man}, of the people, and sets out the different

points of view for and against a larger Islamist role in society (34). The chasm between

urban modernizers and ordinalT people is detailed in several of the works, perhaps most

bitterly in Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoÿlu's The Stranger, considered here in the same

chapter with Giintekin's work. Beyond the scope of this work, perhaps, would have

been a consideration of the total oeuvre of Karaosmanoÿlu, who made in his twelve

novels a penetrating depiction of Turkey from the end of the 19ÿ century until the

second half of the 20th. A major new study of his work, which sets out in symbolism and

xdvid prose the entire spectacle of the Turkish modernist experience, would be a

valuable contribution to the study of the Turkish novel and 20%cenmU Turkey.

To back up a litde, Seyhan addresses the criticism of the use of translations as a

vehicle for modernization in Turkey by quoting Ziya G6kalp, the Turkish nationalist

writer who said that Turkey must learn both from the West and from its oxxm folkore.

Seyhan points out the role that translations played in helping to form both the modern

German language and German nationalism, and indicates a similar function for

translations in Turkey. The first Turkish 'novelists may have read extensively in

European, particularly French, literature, but they wrote their own world, however

narrowly we may fred that defined. MaW contemporary readers forget, although they

might intellectually comprehend, the importance that such works played in creating a

modern language based on spoken Turkish that replaced the ornate Ottoman of the late

19tu century. New education along Western lines produced a new readership for a new

literature. Similar processes took place in neighboring Greece, and in fact throughout

Europe, as education and literacy became more widespread. By the early 20m century,

Book Review -JTL 143

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND PLACE:AZADE SEYHANÿS TALES OF CROSSED DESTINIES

Turkish writers were looking both to East and West for inspiration. In addifon,

indigenous traditions played a role in fiction formation that has yet to be fully explored.

The result, by the turn of the last century, were writers like Halide Edip A&var, also

treated along with Gfintekin and Karaosmanoglu, who spoke directly and dramatically

to an increasingly wide audience. They remain popular today because of the clarity of

their analysis and its continued applicability as much as for their masterful rendering of a

seminal period in the formation of modern Turkey. This is the context from which

Azade Seyhan starts her examination.

The chapter entitled "Growing Pains of the Nation" treats four novels selected

to provide a quadratic image of a society creating itself in the catalyst of war and

destruction. Halide Edip Adtvar is depicted in her many roies as author, political activist,

and model. Her early novels raised the consciousness of Turkish women, as her later

ones raised the national consciousness of the reading public. Her skillful combination of

narrative and nationalist rhetoric in the works Seyhan treats--Memoirs of Halide Edip, The

Turkish Ordeal, and The Shirt oflVlame indicate why Halide Edip continues to be one of

the more popular Turkish authors, despite stylistic problems. Seyhan treats Achvar not

only as an author, but as an icon of the age in which she lived. She questions Adavar's

vision of a mystical Islam in which East and West live harmoniously together, as

opposed to the alternative darker portraits in the works of Karaosmanoÿlu and

Gfintekin. For Seyhan, however, Adivar is much more than the author of the works

treated: she is a central figure in the drama of her time, and as such, her worksÿhere

mostly autobiographicalÿare basically documents that both portray and explain the

intellectual and philosophical development of Adivar herself. A&var's synthesis of East

and West is perhaps more clearly depicted in her novel The Clowu and His Daughter,

originally written in English and later rewritten in a very popuktr Turkish version as

Sinekli BakkaL The thematic approach of this chapter, however, is directed towards first-

hand accounts of the War of Independence, which The Clown and his Daughteris not.

The second novel in this chapter is Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoÿlu's The Stranger.

Shocking in its day and brutal in its realism, Karaosmanoÿhi's work raises serious

questions about the relations between different classes in society that are still immediate.

Virtually all the characters in the novel are wounded, ill, or crippled, including the

stranger from Istanbul who comes to live in what he thinks will be a peaceful escape in

Anatolia but which becomes the war front. In Karaosmanoÿhi's heavily symbolic work,

even the land itself is ill. The complex relations and changes in the narrative invite, as

Seyhan points out, repeated readings. Both Adivar and Karaosmanoÿlu experienced

disappointment as their idealism ran aground on the shoals of realpolilik. In Adivar's

\

144 JTL - Book Review

ROBERT P, FINN

, case, this resulted in an estrangement from Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk and years of self-

imposed exile. For Karaosmanoÿlu, it meant an obligatory and successful career as a

diplomat abroad. Seyhan points out different reactions to Karaosmanoÿlu's work:

s@stic objections to its uneven progression from joumalisuc reporting to personal

philosophical musings; strong negative views of his scathing portrayal of Anatolian

x411agers; and strong praise of the novel for its originality and unique approach, as it was

one of the first Turkish novels to escape the urban confines of Istanbul. Underlying the

novel's physical and mental landscape are the entrenched values of Islamic

fundamentalism and traditional conservatism, abetted by poverty and ignorance. One of

Seyhan's themes in this book is the continuation of these values in Turkish society and

their ability to reappdar precipitously, and her work is laden with references and cross-

references to these issues. In tandem with this is the consideration of the narrative

techniques and points of view of the authors, and it is in the latter context that she

makes wide and constant reference to authors not from the Turkish milieu in order to

help the reader ÿ4ew these works from Turkey as part of a larger intellectual

development, something which has been much neglected in the past.

Re,at Nuri Gÿntekin's The Autobiograyay of a Turkish Gid is one of the most

enduringly popular of Tm'kish novels. As Seyhan notes, "[e]ven critics who

underestimate Gfintekin's work as overly sentimental concede that he has touched a

nerve in the nation's psyche and that, more than any other Turkish writer, he has

succeeded in mapping the complex emotional landscape of his people" (64). OpeN),

sentimental and romantic, the novel's positivist views have led countless young Turkish

women to become teachers in Anatolia like the novel's heroine, Feride. Seyhan likens

the novel to a positive version of The So,rows of Young ÿl et@er, and terms it as popular

with its audience, and in the same way, as Louisa May Alcott's Lÿle IgZomo¢ in the

United States. Here the character is idealistic, perhaps oxierdrawn, able to surx4ve and

even to: triumph a little against a retrograde cast of characters representing religious

repression, base lust, and venality. The novel appeared in 1922, while the war to

determine the fate of Anatolia was still taking place, Its message of youthful idealism

faced with religious and bureaucratic resistance is one that continues to resonate. Seyhan

correctly likens Fet'ide to the Peace Corps volunteers who came to Turkey in the 1960s

with the same kind of idealism. She also points out that Feride's "cute" manner and her

entitlement as a member of the Istanbul educated elite n-fight not play so well in

Anatolia today, but that the appeal of the novel is Giintekin's sense of humanity and

knowledge of the Turkish people, rather than the compelling quality of his political-- agenda. Critics have taken Giintekin to task for blaming everything on religion, but, as

Book Review -JTL t45

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND PLACE:AZADE SEYHANÿS TALES OF CROSSED DtÿSTIArlES

the famous critic Ahmed Hamdi Tanpmar pointed out, the novel was "a concept of

responsibility that made good without shaking our world" (70).

The final novel in the quartet is Relat Nuri Gfintekin's The Green Night. Here, the

hero is the opposite of Feride. He comes from an Islamic background, starts out in a

medrese, and gradually, through his studies, realizes the negative effects of religion on

society. Seyhan helpfully quotes Atatilrk to the same effect in her discourse. The novel

is as much about corruption and power as it is about religion. The hero, Sahin, comes to

a village as a schoolteacher, where he attempts to free the students from' religious

obscurantism, symbolized by the turbans they wear. As the novel progresses, Greeks

occupy the village and Sahin is imprisoned on a Greek island, coming back to find the

same religious fundamentalists back in power, now as the clean-shaven representatives

of the new republic. Seyhan establishes parallels with contemporary novels from

Afghanistan and Algeria, describing Gfintekin's work as "a catalogue of a calamity

foretold". She also notes that both The Green Night and The Antobiogra2bhy af a Turkish Girl

adumbrate the socially engaged Turkish novels of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the next chapter of the book, entitled "Social Responsibility and the Aesthetic

Imperative", Seyhan takes the reader through a sample of important Turkish works that

move across both realms of the title. The first, Mahmut Makal's Our Village, published

in 1950, became a bestseller and earned its author a prison term. Based on journals he

kept while serving as a village schoolteacher, Makat's work revealed in a stark light the

difficulties of life in a village and the shortcomings of official modernization. The

reader, familiar by now with these themes from the earlier novels, encounters a first-

hand unvarnished depiction that not only portrays the villagers realistically, but also

shows the political manipulation of religion which continues to be a source of

controversy. The Western reader viRI be shocked when faced with mothers of students

who literally cannot talk to the teacher but communicate through intermediaries or by

gestures. It would be optimistic to think this has all disappeared today. Makal's work

began an enormous outpouring of work over the next several decades, known

collectively as the "village literature" movement. While few reached the level of Makal's

work, important writers such as Fakir Baykurt brought social concerns and hard-hitÿng

realities to the attention of the reading public, often isolated from the countryside.

One of Turkey's most beloved and famous writers, YaFar Kemal, is the next

subject of Seyhan's work. His Memed, My Hawk, first serialized in 1953, has become a

world classic. It combines romance, village life, magic realism, and the eternal appeal of

the noble outlaw in a tale that has had universal appeal. Kemal's literary appeal goes in

V,vo directions: back into mythology and folk literature, and forward into magic realism

146 JTL - Book Review

ROBERT IJ. FINN

and the metafictional narratives of contemporary prose. He is fact a binding novelist for

this study. Seyhan considers the novel through dual lenses, that of Berna Moran's

analysis of the novel in its Turkish context, and Eric Hobsbawn's Bandits, which takes a

more universalist approach. The comparativist will find dais chapter useful for a study

that takes students thematically across literatures.

Yaÿar Kemal was for decades Turkey's perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize,

but in the end it was won by Orhan Pamuk. The two writers, Turkey's best known

abroad, are quite dissimilar, but, as Seyhan points out, they are united by their intent to

criticize the state in their works. Seyhan underlines this by placing them next to one

another in this chapter. Pamuk's Snow is a highly constructed political allegory that

includes graphic imagery, some ostensible sympathy for Islamists, and a movement and

balance that reminds one of Japanese &area. The novel takes place in Kars, a cit3ÿ that

was part of the Russian Empire from 1888-1924 and still resembles, in maW ways, a

Russian imperial border post town. It contains dark octagonal mosques, tombs, and

churches that evoke its complicated history in a remote area where Turks, Georgians,

Armenians, Laz, and a host of other smaller ethnic groups have interacted for centuries.

Pamuk's choice of the cit3, as the setting for'the novel may have stemmed from a desire

to find a place that was in Turkey yet sui geneds. In his novel, it is the setting for a

political struggle couched in intellectual terms where the author, as Seyhan notes,

"neither censures nor censors" (102). The actual events of girls' suicides that take place

in the novel may have come from the town of Barman in southeastern Turkey, Seyhan

indicates. Pamuk's character Ka evokes Franz Kafka; two double characters--of which

there are several sets in the book Necip and Fazfl evoke the poet Necip Faztl

Ktsakiirek; and the names of the characters Silk, Deep Blue, etc.---evoke personal

characteristics in a tradition not exclusively Turkish, but certainly one well used by other

and earlier Tm'kish authors going back to the 19ÿ century. The novel itself, Seyhan

notes, is appropriately structured as a snowflake. It is a complicated moralit3, play

organized on Dostoyevskian themes that offers little comfort for the reader. Aside from

the themes of the book itself, Seyhan discusses Pamuk's wridng style and the difficult3ÿ

for Turks in reading him that could spark lively discussion in a seminar.

The last novd in this section is Adalet Aÿaoÿlu's Cuÿw, which is one of a series

of masterful works she produced docmnenting Turke)?s recent history. In this case, the

novel takes place in the city of Eskilelfir, where a young woman is in the act of leaving

home and running off to Istanbul to join her brother. In Seyhan's analysis, the novel is

about the fear of being late, of belatedness, and she analyzes the work in terms of the

seven main characters, each of whom is in a different state of repose or actlxdt3, in

Book Review-JTL 147

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND PLACE:AZADE SEYHANÿS TALgS OF CROSSED DESTIIVIES

relation to the central fact of the drama; namely, the passage of time and the specter of

the night. Seyhan makes an excellent intellectual dissection of the novel and ties it to

Georg Lukfics and other thinkers. Aÿaoÿlu has said about her novel: "its population

belongs to a time and context in which people have not yet been clearly--defined"

(Seyhan 116/Aÿaoglu viii). It concerns a group of people, "aristocratic relics from the

Ottoman period" (Agaoÿlu viii), who are struggling to make it through the barrier of the

curfew to take part in a new society. For the foreign reader, the novel will provide an

extremely useful analysis of the changes that took place in Turkey in this period, a

prelude to the large sociological changes of recent years. A friend who visited a Black

Sea city this summer observed- that all of the "old families" of her childhood have gone,

their" homes empty or replaced by apartments. A new class has taken over. This novel is

about those people who are no longer there. As it looks forward to the future, Aÿaoÿlu's

work also evokes the past. However, a discussion of the structural dements of the novel

relating it to the "fatherless" homes of the Tanzimat novel which both Jale Parla and I

have separately discussed--would have been useful for the international reader.

Seyhan has led the reader carefully through Pamuk and Agaoglu to the complete

sense of paralysis and angst which characterize Bilge Karasu's Night. Karasu's allegorical

fiction has been compared with George Orwell, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, and

Kafka, but, as Seyhan notes, also contains strong parallels with Italo Calvino's On a

Winter's Night a Traveler and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground as well.

There is not really a plot, but rather a series of observations on a metanarrative that has,

as Seyhan says, "an intentionally intertextual character". The text is a series of dark

narratives told by perhaps four authors, or only one, filled with terror and horror, an

endless stream of fragments that raise the question of sanity not only to the reader, but

to.the "ÿvriter as well. 7[n this allegorization of fascism, Karasu establishes referential ties

to manylkither discourses an&takes the reader on a difficult journey through the heartand mind.

As though in relief, Seyhan next deals with Aziz Nesin, Turkey's satirist par

excellence, enormously popular except with those who tried to burn him to death in a

famous attack on the Madimak Hotel in Sivas (not Sinop, as in the text) in 1993. Nesin

survived, but thirty-seven others were killed. His prolific stories and plays continue to be

universal in appeal. Seyhan specifically examines the novel Hayri the Barber Sumdm6. The

subject of the book, Hayri, is guilty--as he admits--of rape and murder. But he also

has, as he states, changed, and the person who is hanged is not the same Hayri who

committed the crime. The debate in the novel, always portrayed in the funniest way, is

about the death sentence, about the concept of crime and punishment, and, ultimately,

148 JTL - Book Review t

ROBERT P. FINN

about us all. Seyhan takes the discussion about the death penalty to Mdchel Foucault,

and that of gallows humor to Sigmund Freud. Nesin "enacts philosophy, not through

theory, but through parody" (131). At the hanging, "[t]he Imam Effendi said to Hayri,

'May God forgive )Tour sins! Barber Hayri with the meaning of thank you, said, Wours

too"' (133). As always, Nesin brings the discussion back to each of us. Readers will

enjoy Nesin's work, but Seyhan takes them behind the curtain to sho,a: how serious it

actually is.

Ahmed Hamdi Tanpmar is one of the most important Turkish thinkers of the

20th century. His literary and critical works contain one of the most serious and

insightful examinations of Turkey in its changing expressions. The concern of his work

and of his novel Peace of Mind is the question he asks at the end of his essay on Istanbul

in his book Five Cilie¢. "[WJhere and how are we to connect with the past?" (Seyhan

140). Tanpmar savored Istanbul and the amazing composition (terkip) of histories,

religions, and associations that still inform, in ever-diminishing expressions, the life of

the city. The reader would be advised at this point to make a short diversion and read, if

one has not already done so, Caivino's Inddble Cilies, which Seyhan uses as a tool to

guide readers through Tanpmar's world. Calvino's cities are of the mind, and so is

Tanpmar's, although his is grounded in the palimpsest of ages that is Istanbul. Seyhan's

informed explication of Tanpmar's work takes the reader through the gates of Western

Romanticism and back again, alongside the paths of "Oriental music and mysticism and

back again to the beginning, where the questions of the possibility of reconciliation with

the past and self-recognition as a conduit for reality remain pressing concerns. The

characters of the novel are, in a sense, all reflections of one another, as is the underlying

sense of unit), that is the heart of the matter. For Tanpmar, the comprehension of the

unity comes with an apprehension of the mutability that prevents stasis, the sense of

imminent change--here depicted by the temporal setting on the eve of the outbreak of

the Second World War--and the sense of loss that is a leitmotif of Istanbul.

Tanpmar's successor and acknowledged student is Orhan Pamuk. If Tanpmar's

world is concerned with huzur ("peace of mind"), Pamuk's is concerned with hiiziin

("melancholy"). Seyhan's work examines the two by looking at Pamuk's The Black Book,

a tale that is metaphorical, mysticai, and mysterious. The double characters of Pamuk's

Snow appear again, this time embodied in one and the same person, who, as his

counterpart in Pamuk's The White Castle, actually becomes the other character. The novel

is a multidimensional equation that can be read as a detective story, morality play,

allegory, or romance, among other possibilities. For Pamuk in this novel, the sense of

melancholy expressed in the endless layers of Istanbul, a collage of images of the past

Book Rmdew-JTL 149

LOOKING BEYOND TIME AND PLACE:AZADE SEYHANÿS TALES OF CROSSED DESTINIES

and present cloaked in a noir framework, is perhaps the main element, if not the main

character. Pamuk views the novel as a "personal encyclopedia" about Istanbul, a

concept he later developed in The Museum @Innocence. Seyhan notes the Romantic literary

aspect of this approach in this and several others of Pamuk's works. Pamuk is now

establishing an objective correlative of this in an actual museum he is sponsoring in

Istanbul. Enormous amounts have been written about Pamuk's work. Seyhan chooses

to step aside from them and interestingly looks at the novel as a kind of second-level

Bildungsroman whose protagonist is in the process of creating a new reality. In the

process, he must deal with Istanbul as an allegory of loss, which includes, it would

appear, the author as well.

To round out this section, Seyhan includes Yaÿar Kemal's The Sea-Crossed

Fishemlan. Here we have magic realism, a post-romantic melancholy, and social critidsm

all wrapped up in an enthusiastic package w.hich transports the sensibilities of Kemai's

earlier works to an urban context. Seyhan appreciates Kemal's direct and clear

description, in contrast to what she calls the "overwritten" works of Tanpmar and

Pamuk. Here again is an opportunity for a lively discussion of the utility of different

forms of writing. In Kemal's novel, the destruction of the natural environment by short-

term capitalistic avarice is summarized in the relationship bee,veen the hero and a

dolphin. The scene is not the cosmopolitan milieu of Pamuk, but the shnpler and, one

might argue, purer world of fishermen along the Sea of Marmara. The contrast is stark,

the narrative compelling, the action swift: a different Istanbul (and there are so many).

The final chapter of Seyhan's book deals with post-modernist fiction. In an

introductory essay, she explains modernist and post-modernist concepts and why

Turkey does not quite fit in, telling us cozily that Turkey has been "homeschooled" on

the subject. For this final chapter, she makes three choices from among the many

talented writers active in Turkey today. Two of them carry on the examination of the

city from the previous chapter. Latife Tekin's Berd KrisSn: Tales from the Garbage Hills

brings magic and realism to the slums, but not, Seyhan would have it, magic realism.

The tales of the tide come form to the lives of the inhabitants as they change "Garbage

Hill" into "Flower HÿI". The magic comes from the fairy tales that float through the

text like the winds that carry off the roofs and even the local mosque. The point of view

is completely that of the outsiders, who are the insiders of this alternative universe that

must eÿst according to its own rules. These may include unkind treatment of some

minorities, open prostitution, and a host of other dements not politically correct. But, as

the book dearly demonstrates, they have to live there.

150 JTL - Book Review

ROBERT P. FINN

Aslt Erdogan's "The City with the Red Cape", as Seyhan correctly translates

Kam¢lÿ Pelerinli Kent (translated by Amy Spangler as The Ciÿ, in C*imson Cloak), is a

marvelous tale, presumably largely autobiographical, of life in Rio de Janeiro, a city

which, as the author notes, "makes the most dissolute European city look like 'a Boy

Scout Camp"'. Death, disease, and all of the known and unknown sins roam through

the streets of this fascinating novel. It sees Rio through the eyes of a Turkish graduate

student becoming a gri*ga who lives to no particular purpose in the tropical decay,

writing a novel about someone writing a novel about being there. Erdoÿan's prose is

riveting and her point of view completely unique. The novel is an excellent selection to

show the sensitivities of a different point of view through familiar eyes.

Finally, Orhan Pamuk appears again, this time with My Name is Red. One of the

most widely read of Panauk's novels, it offers the familiar range of levels for the reader,

who can take it as a mystet3, novel, historical tract, philosophical essay on change, or

comment on literat3, theory. Seyhan offers her own comments on the book, saliently

pointing out that the problems of identification in Pamuk's other novels here come

down to representation. The question of whether to see as god sees or as man sees is at

the root of the novel's tension, and, in a wider sense, in Pamuk's other works as well.

In her conclusion, Azade Seyhan once again points out for the reader some of

the concerns of the Turkish novel and how the), are part of a wider intellectual

discourse. Among these are the question of belatedness and the inherent dualities of the

Turkish position, which she correctly notes are part of the intellectual dialogue in many

other countries. What this book does, and does extremely well, is to ftrmly place the

Turkish novel in a xxdder context to show that it is part of a whole, another fish

swimming in the same river, as it were, with the same concern about being late. One

hopes that this work will inspire others to make similar exatninations of the questions of

change, cultural alteration, and religiosity that are an intrinsic part of contemporat3, life.

It is no longer a question of whether things wiU change, but rather of where the

change--which is global and irreversible will take us, a question of the very issues of

identity and representation that are an intrinsic part of the Turkish novel.

Book Rex4ew-JTL 151