Books I Read, April 2021
Dear friends,
Last month I threw myself into the study of Turkish literature and history.
Why? No good practical reason — just the aleatory enthusiasm of an amateur reader. I can point to proximate but not final causes for the project: I read, a few months ago, the stories of Sait Faik Abasıyanık and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, just because they happened to be published by Archipelago Books, and they whet my appetite to know and understand their tradition; I watched the tv show Ethos (which I strongly recommend, by the way), and it intrigued me about modern Turkish society; I witnessed the anniversary of our collective pandemic isolation come and go, and that created a hunger in me for deep escapism. Escapism at the level of a single book is nothing compared to escapism into the epic history of a whole region and the evolution of a whole literature.
But I knew virtually nothing about Turkey or Turkish literature, so I was starting from scratch. The only way to start is to start. Harvest all the low-hanging fruit. Attack from multiple angles. Try everything.
(I remember when I learned this basic, crucial lesson of self-education. It was in grad school. In my first semester I took a class on contemporary political philosophy, organized around Jurgen Habermas’s dense books of social theory. The class involved a bunch of philosophy PhD students like myself and one law student. From the first class discussion, I noticed a sharp difference between the PhD students and the law student. We were reading like snails, as our philosophical education had taught us to do. We poured over each line of our text, reading and rereading, aporia-hunting, comparing the German. Meanwhile, the law student seemed to have Habermas’s whole context at his fingertips. His observations in class were always usefully clarifying. What was he doing differently? I asked him. He told me he was reading lots of other stuff about Habermas before, during, and after reading our assigned text, which he only read once as a single source among many. He’d start with wikipedia and media profiles, sources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summaries in the work of other, easier-to-understand authors, and just the abstracts of many academic papers. He solved the problem of the hermeneutic circle by just starting everywhere at once; and therefore, even though he was spending only a fraction of the time on the actual text under discussion as the rest of us, he was getting a lot more out of it, and organizing it in an ever-growing web of meaning and context. Ever since, when I want to learn about something new, I try to flank the problem. I study the main thing, yes, but I also seek every available resource for context and simplification, scorning nothing, even if later expertise reveals those first helps to be reductive or trite — you can’t revise your understanding of something you never got a handle on in the first place.)
Anyway, the result of my dive into Turkish literature and history is that I now know something about the Ottoman Empire and the revolution that lead to the Republic of Turkey, something about a bunch of different points on the literary map of Turkey, something about the history and geography (topographic and social) of Istanbul, something about the Turkish language, something about the regionally specific strands of Islam — and only now do I feel like I can begin to read the tradition with purpose and the inklings of understanding. This is what I read:
Anatolian Tales, by Yashar Kemal (trans. Thilda Kemal). A collection of short stories about the suffering and class struggle of peasants on the southern plains of Anatolia in the early 20th century. A widowed father carries his starving baby from nursing woman to nursing woman, desperately seeking someone who can feed it. Whole villages perish at the hand of planters who flood the ground to grow rice, bringing clouds of malarial mosquitoes. Women are bought and sold, relentlessly exploited, betrayed, used, and discarded. Solidarity among the wretched is soured by their cruelty to one another, and rebellion against the oppressor is always doomed to fail. These are sad, hard stories, and the only moments of relief from their wretchedness are simple, vivid descriptions of the landscape in which they take place, of the smells and temperatures, colors and textures of the natural world.
A Long Day’s Evening, by Bilge Karasu (trans. Aron Aji and Fred Stark). A novel in the form of an asymmetric triptych, two parts of which feature 8th century Greek Orthodox monks dealing with the consequences of Leo III’s ban on Icons, and the last of which features — it seems — the writer himself, dealing with the consequences of the 1960 Turkish coup. The third section is shorter than the others and, obviously, distinct in overt content. But all three fit together in theme and style — weaving together paragraphs of very embodied nature writing, political and personal memory, and inner monologue. I was entranced by this book. In the first place, by its vividness. Despite a fragmented, elliptical, grammatically and typographically non-standard form, it is a transporting narrative: each of the three sections creates a sensuous setting I won’t soon forget, a mountainous and pine-covered island, a steep hill outside Ravenna, and a lane thickly covered in mulberry trees from which fat leaf-munching silkworms dangle and drop. In the second place, I was entranced by its unity-in-variety. From the most abstruse of philosophical reflections — on the nature of the concept of zero, for example — to the most untheorizable narration of physical movement and sense — precise descriptions of the physical mechanics of walking and sitting and eating, and of the sensations created in a body by these acts — it ties together modes of experiencing the world typically disjunct, but here simultaneously disclosed by a prose that, through precision, somehow erases distinctions.
Black Milk, by Elif Shafak. A speculative memoir about the intersection of marriage, motherhood, and literary ambition. It’s speculative because a major thread of the book involves a fantasy scenario in which Shafak interacts with the “finger-women” who live inside her — personifications of different aspects of her personality, which she portrays as a “harem” full of disagreements about how she ought to live her life. The book also gathers thumbnail biographies of various other women writers, focusing upon their adventures and misadventures with motherhood. It wraps these two threads in a straightforward series of memoiristic scenes charting Shafak’s journey from distrust of motherhood, through pregnancy, to her writer’s-block-inducing post-partum depression. I admired the architecture of this book, but I have to admit I was appalled by the writing itself, which is more pedestrian and cliche-ridden than I thought possible from a writer with Shafak’s level of critical acclamation.
Real Life, by Brandon Taylor. [A diversion, obviously, from the Turkish theme.] A novel about a few days of romantic and professional crisis in the life of a grad student studying biochemistry at a midwestern university, as its author was doing when he wrote it. A surprising romance with a white guy (the narrator, like the author, is a Black gay man) whom the narrator had previously thought of as his archnemesis and presumed to be heterosexual, and a horrifying escalation of the racism the narrator experiences from his lab-colleagues and academic advisor, both climax at the same time. Two things stood out to me about this book — and I should say that I haven’t read a contemporary novel I liked this much in ages — : first, how accurately it evoked the existential mood of graduate school in the 21st centruy. The central thematic of “real life” vs. whatever grad school is, which sounds silly when you just say it like that but poses a genuine problem from inside the experience, has never been expressed so well — or thought through so thoroughly, I think — in anything I’ve read. Second, the slow and observant pacing of the story — told largely through set piece social encounters and introvert moments in the protagonist’s house and lab — was perfect. I’m not used to encountering such excellent pacing between the same two covers as such excellent sentences.
Madonna in a Fur Coat, by Sabahattin Ali (trans. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe). A young man, down-on-his-luck in Ankara, is hired to be a clerk in the firm of an old friend, where he becomes very interested in a reserved colleague he encounters at the office. He befriends this colleague and receives from him on his deathbed a secret diary about a tragic romance from the man’s youth. An uninterrupted transcription of the diary forms the majority of the text: it describes how the son of a factory owner from Turkey is sent to Berlin to study soap-making, where he instead reads German literature and visits art galleries. In one such gallery, he encounters the self-portrait of a female painter. Obsessed by it, he returns to stare every day until, eventually, he meets the painter herself. They become friends, then lovers. Then the young man’s father dies and he must return to Turkey; they separate, promising to come together again, only to lose track of each other. This tragedy colors the young man’s whole life, and he only discovers, toward its end, that in fact his lover was pregnant with his child and died shortly after they parted, and so his assumptions of abandonment were ungenerous and unnecessary.
A Millenium of Turkish Literature: A Concise History, by Talat S. Halman. What it says on the tin. I found it useful for contextualizing some stuff I had already read, but to be honest I lost the narrative thread of this book in the sea of names. Lists upon lists of names, mostly tied to untranslated books I can’t read. This is the sort of book where the main text is broken up constantly by inset, textbook-like quotations from the works it is discussing, and while I appreciate these windows, I also found the whole assemblage incredibly distracting and difficult to follow. The main useful takeaway from this book, for me, was a grasp of the sources of modern Turkish literature in the divided and class-based streams of pre-modern Ottoman literature: the highbrow court poetry based on Persian models and the lowbrow folk stories and poetry kept alive by peasants. Also, just: poetry. This book caused me to realize how crucial poetry was to the whole history of the Ottoman Empire and the early days of modern Turkey. I hope to follow up on this realization by perusing the six-volume history of Ottoman Poetry written in the early 20th century by E. J. W. Gibbs.
The Forty Rules of Love, by Elif Shafak. A novel twining together the story of a Massachusetts housewife who abandons her bad marriage to run away with a Sufi nomad, and a retelling of the friendship between the Sufi mystic Shams and the poet Rumi, which gave rise to the one of the classics of world poetry (and mysticism) in Rumi’s massive poem cycle, the Mathnawi. The same problems I noted with Shafak’s other book plagued this one, too, but I found it an extraordinarily affecting work nonetheless, and it made me want to read Rumi at firsthand.
Mysticism for Beginners, by Adam Zagajewski; trans. Clare Cavanaugh. A short book of poems from one of my favorite poets. He died recently. Strange that he should die so soon after Philippe Jacottet, another favorite poet whose work greatly resembled his. I love in his work the combination of overt bookishness, simple language (which works very well in translation, I think), sharp flashes of political criticism and lament, and devoted observation of the surface of the human and natural world. Poems shot through with longing and given to memorable instances of zeugma.
The Pasha of Cuisine, by Saygin Ersin (trans. Mark Wyers). A fantasy heist novel in which a magical cook — the Pasha of Cuisine — rescues his childhood first love from the locked and secret depths of the Sultan’s harem. Full of great food writing, expert genre-pacing, and some of my favorite training-scenes in any heist novel — in which the cook learns to use astrology and ancient medicine, spice-lore and psychoanalysis (more or less), to pull off his audacious lover’s heist. Made me hungry for more Turkish genre fiction.
Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (trans. Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C.K. Williams). See my description of Zagajewski’s work above. A sample: “Moths watched us through / the window. Seated at the table, / we were skewered by their lambed gazes, / harder than their shattering wings. / You’ll always be outside, / past the pane. And we’ll be here within, / more and more in. Moths watched us / through the window, in August.”
Story Genius, by Lisa Cron and Public Influence, by Mira Sucharov. I’m grouping these books togther because they are instances of a reading habit I’m almost — almost — ashamed of, which is: I’m addicted to books about the craft of writing. I gobble them up whole. I really do. Each of these I acquired and read immediately in one sitting. Like most craft books about writing, they are both padded with lots of unecessary stuff and contain, at best, maybe ten pages of useful information and advice. Story Genius describes an interesting method for developing plot through targeted elaboration of a character’s back-story, and it gave me ideas about how to do character-based fiction-writing with more efficient imagining. (I should add that Story Genius is marketed as an application of neuroscience to the rhetoric of fiction, and this is false. As someone who has read a lot of actual psychonarratological research, I can tell you right now that, first, that stuff doesn’t have many direct applications for writers, and, second, this book hardly engages with that science anyway.) Public Influence is a book about writing and pitching op-eds, aimed at academics who might want to use their scholarly expertise to offer public commentary. Most of the pages are worthless advice about how to use social media to “influence the conversation” — in this case, argue with people on twitter, a mode of public writing I’m pretty burned out on. But I appreciated the sections where Sucharov traced the writing and publication of a few of her own op-eds from inception, through pitching, to acceptance. That’s the way the best books about writing do it, with direct personal examples.
Still underway, but I have to mention them: As I was reading everything else this month, I was slowly making my way through two big history books, which I expect to finish sometime in May. The first is a history of the dynasty founded by Osman in the 14th century, which governed the Ottoman Empire for its entire 600 year history: Osman’s Dream, by Caroline Finkel. The other was a history of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic: The Emergence of Modern Turkey, by Bernard Lewis. Both are dense but well-written. I’ll say more about them when I finish them, but they’re the main thread of gradually increasing understanding that runs between the other, miscellaneous things I’ve been reading.
And that’s it! Next month, I’ll be tackling certain specific high-points of Turkish literature which I was saving for a time when I had a better understanding: the work of Orhan Pamuk, Nazim Hikmet’s epic novel in verse, Human Landscapes from My Country, Yashar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk, the poems of Rumi, more Elif Shafak, and possibly some or all of E.J.W. Gibbs’s history of Ottoman Poetry (assuming I can get my hands on it). But I’ll also come up for air with a bunch of non-Turkish stuff I conceived a desire to read last month. I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.
Until then, you have my warm regards,
Robert Minto