The English debut of a Turkish star
Translation is the neglected middle child of the English-speaking world. While the occasional book seems to burst through (the Scandinavians — from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multivolume autobiography to Stieg Larsson’s thrillers — seem to have the best luck), most barely get the public’s notice. This has prompted the Man Booker folks to revamp its annual foreign fiction prize in co-operation with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Man Booker International prize will be awarded annually for a book in English translation, starting in 2016.
The lack of interest explains why acclaimed Turkish author Hasan Ali Toptas’s novel Reckless, first published in 2013, is the first of his ten novels to be translated into English. He has been called the new Kafka, a useful signifier that his novels do not follow an orderly fashion.
For most of us, Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has become the face of Turkish writing with the publication of My Name is Red in 1998. Toptas, whose first book was published in 1987, and is a decade younger than Pamuk, is only late to the rest of us. His award-winning work is already available in German, French and Korean. Now “discovered” by Bloomsbury, Toptas has another novel, Shadowless, coming out in 2017.
Reckless is the kind of novel where a middle-aged man visits his landlady for the final time only to become engulfed in a seemingly hallucinatory mist while she launches into her tragic and unsettling life story.
Toptas has created a world where memories and dreams coalesce as if the main character drifts between consciousness and unconsciousness. Minor characters recite monologues that are pages long; stories are told within stories, which sometimes turn out to be part of a dream.
The man in question is Ziya Bey, a melancholic figure who has suffered much and whose sleep is haunted by the vision of killing a helpless bird when he was a boy.
Now he has decided to retire to a countryside house built just for him by a friend from his army days when the two were young conscripts. “Tired of dealing with life’s chaos,” Ziya seeks solace in a place made mythic during the ordeal they shared thirty years earlier.
Their reunion hints at a forgotten debt, forcing Ziya back in time as a recruit who would while away his time drinking a homebrew made out of cologne. Toptas depicts life on the Turkish-Syrian border where the conditions are nasty and ultimately meaningless. Cruel commanders force soldiers on night patrol to attack marauding sheep, tea smugglers and the occasional lost traveller.
Meanwhile, Ziya is drawn into undercurrents of village life. The seemingly calm refuge slowly becomes as nightmarish as his memories.
Toptas keeps his readers off-kilter, placing an extraordinary tale alongside the ordinariness of a meal of stewed haricot beans, pilaf, pickles and semolina pudding. He loops in and out of the stories of strangers and throwing the reader “between several different time currents, each flowing in its own direction.” There are times when you have to flip between pages to double check the story line to figure out whether you are reading about a dream or “reality.”
Translated by Maureen Freely with John Angliss — Freely also brought Nobel Laureate Pamuk’s novels to life in English — Reckless proves there is more to Turkish fiction than one man. It is a strange, troubling but compelling ride of a novel. Piali Roy is a Toronto writer.