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mayog 's review for:
Dear Shameless Death
by Latife Tekin
This book grew on me slowly, because it was set in a cultural environment about which I know very little: modern Turkey around the time of the 1980 coup. In it, Tekin relates the story of a family, and specifically of a woman, Atiye, trying to raise her family, first a rural village of Turkey where a bus and a radio create consternation, and later in the poorer neighborhoods of the city of Istanbul.
Widely compared stylistically to Marquez's magic realism, Tekin's novel is riddled with magic, charms, blue beads to ward off the evil eye, red threads tied around the heads of newly-delivered mothers, and talk of djinns and the devil. All of this shares space with form of Islamic religiosity, marked in a particular way by the devotion, in turn, of Atiye's flighty husband Huvat and his son Halit.
While I agree with most of the reviews that name Atiye as the central character of the novel, I disagree that the novel is really a coming of age story for the youngest daughter, Dirmat. Rather, I read the novel as a series of interlocking narratives that reveal how how hard it is for rural women and men to make it in the city, especially without the necessary training or capital. Tekin does not romanticize life in the village; indeed, when the family leaves its village, Dirmat is being bullied mercilessly by the entire village who accuse her of calling forth the djinns against them, and of being djinned herself. Yet, once the family relocates to the city, each struggles to find a place. Huvat, the father, never finds useful work, going being being a devotee to a particular Islamic teacher and being enamored of the sea. Nuğber, her eldest child and first daughter, wrestles with being unmarried in the midst of the city for most of the novel, and ends up unhappily married toward the end. Hilat, his eldest son, struggles to stay married to his Zekiye once he's out of the village, especially after returning from military service. Seyit, the second son, becomes disabled in a construction accident, but not before he becomes, for a time, a neighborhood heavy, threatening people with physical violence. Mahmut, the youngest, teaches himself geometry in an attempt to find work in construction. And Dirmit takes to books and school and poetry, even though, at every turn, her imagination is sometimes quite violently quashed by her fearful family.
Arguably the two strongest characters are Atiye and Dirmat, neither of whom fit into convention. Atiye tries, but never fully fits into the life of Huvat's village. Dirmat tries, but never fits at all into the conventions of her family. And as such, they also find themselves consistently at odds with one another. At the end, however, Dirmat seems fated to move forward into a new way of living out her culture, symbolized perhaps by a red carnation held to her breast at the end of the novel.
In the end, the story feels neither heroic nor particulary tragic. It feels honest, but honest in a way that doesn't always resonate with Western methods of storytelling. It feels, rather, like an honest portrayal of the enchanted world in which one particular family and culture lives and moves, and the external pressures brought to bear on it by "commonists" (as Dirmit says), and other forces that threaten to destroy that world forever.
Widely compared stylistically to Marquez's magic realism, Tekin's novel is riddled with magic, charms, blue beads to ward off the evil eye, red threads tied around the heads of newly-delivered mothers, and talk of djinns and the devil. All of this shares space with form of Islamic religiosity, marked in a particular way by the devotion, in turn, of Atiye's flighty husband Huvat and his son Halit.
While I agree with most of the reviews that name Atiye as the central character of the novel, I disagree that the novel is really a coming of age story for the youngest daughter, Dirmat. Rather, I read the novel as a series of interlocking narratives that reveal how how hard it is for rural women and men to make it in the city, especially without the necessary training or capital. Tekin does not romanticize life in the village; indeed, when the family leaves its village, Dirmat is being bullied mercilessly by the entire village who accuse her of calling forth the djinns against them, and of being djinned herself. Yet, once the family relocates to the city, each struggles to find a place. Huvat, the father, never finds useful work, going being being a devotee to a particular Islamic teacher and being enamored of the sea. Nuğber, her eldest child and first daughter, wrestles with being unmarried in the midst of the city for most of the novel, and ends up unhappily married toward the end. Hilat, his eldest son, struggles to stay married to his Zekiye once he's out of the village, especially after returning from military service. Seyit, the second son, becomes disabled in a construction accident, but not before he becomes, for a time, a neighborhood heavy, threatening people with physical violence. Mahmut, the youngest, teaches himself geometry in an attempt to find work in construction. And Dirmit takes to books and school and poetry, even though, at every turn, her imagination is sometimes quite violently quashed by her fearful family.
Arguably the two strongest characters are Atiye and Dirmat, neither of whom fit into convention. Atiye tries, but never fully fits into the life of Huvat's village. Dirmat tries, but never fits at all into the conventions of her family. And as such, they also find themselves consistently at odds with one another. At the end, however, Dirmat seems fated to move forward into a new way of living out her culture, symbolized perhaps by a red carnation held to her breast at the end of the novel.
In the end, the story feels neither heroic nor particulary tragic. It feels honest, but honest in a way that doesn't always resonate with Western methods of storytelling. It feels, rather, like an honest portrayal of the enchanted world in which one particular family and culture lives and moves, and the external pressures brought to bear on it by "commonists" (as Dirmit says), and other forces that threaten to destroy that world forever.