Sure, you can make your way through Elif Shafak’s list of great books about Istanbul recently published in the NYT. And it will make you a better person. But our novels are more entertaining, we bet! Here, in no particular order, are some books we’ve really enjoyed reading, all by Turkish authors. (See here for our Norway novels.) Here again, themes emerged: there is always a sense of history – many move back and forth between times, others are set in the past. And there is a deep engagement, even in ‘light’ genres, with contemporary issues. Also, more mysteries than we’d expect from a random sampling…
The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse
This 2020 work is Ayfer Tunç’s second, and the title gives you a good sense of the plot. Which it is an understatement to call panoramic. The mental institution in question is situated ‘with its back to the Black Sea’, and we begin and end on the same day (14 February, 2007). But in between, we move, stream-of-consciousness, through a hundred or so characters, tied to one another in ways sometimes tenuous, sometimes intimate. We loved it for its sense of a provincial town, and for its broad sweep of the various people of Turkey, rich, poor, immigrant, emigrant, young, old, etc. Also, a lot of them crazy – and not just the patients in the institution. A really fun, and fast, read, despite being quite long. We hope she writes more novels.
Bastard of Istanbul
This is the Elif Shafak novel we like the most, not least because it addresses the Armenian genocide. This 2006 novel focuses on a household of five women, four sisters and the daughter of one of them (the bastard of the title). Their estranged brother lives in America, and is the stepfather of an Armenian girl who decides to look for her roots by visiting the family. The two girls become friends, and discover that their families are connected in more ways than they know. A great set of mostly-female characters and nuanced treatment of some very sensitive issues (including abortion).
To Kill A Sultan
Ahmet Ümit is a well-known crime novelist, poet, and essayist. We picked this one for you because it gives you Ottoman history lessons for free! A history professor obsessed with his former girlfriend shows up to her apartment in Istanbul to find her dead. But he regularly has fainting spells after which he can’t remember what’s happened. So he suspects that he may have killed her. The main character is Dostoyevskian: paranoid, nervous, and irritable. His ex-girlfriend, he suspects, was working on a theory that Mehmed the Conqueror murdered his own father – explosive if true. (Mehmed was the sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453, hence the moniker ‘the Conqueror’.) More academic novels should be like this.
The Girl in the Tree
Şebnem Işigüzel’s lovely 2016 novel about a girl who decides to live in a tree in Gülhane Park. We soon discover that the women of her family – a grandmother, two aunts, and her mother – have been through A Lot. Including the Istanbul riots of 1955, the Gezi Park protests of 2013, and a terrorist bombing that left her two best friends dead. And she falls in love with a bellhop in a hotel adjacent to the park. Their joint stories provide an unforgettable snapshot of political life in Istanbul. Barone Rampante, move over!
Madonna in a Fur Coat
Sabahattin Ali, the author of this novel, is perhaps best known for his political and satirical writings. He was imprisoned twice and was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, possibly by Turkish forces. This slender novel, which has been immensely popular in Turkey since it was published in the 1940s, seems a world away from such concerns. It’s the story of a young man from Ankara who goes to Berlin just after World War I and falls in love with an artist. What keeps it from being just another novel of thwarted love is the exceptionally well drawn main characters whose uncertainty and angst mirror those of Germany and Turkey in the aftermath of defeat. And the novel has amazingly modern takes on the fluidity of gender roles, the nature of romantic love, and the cultivation of the self.
Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
A great mystery/thriller by Selçuk Altun, featuring an idle rich playboy whose overpowering mother has died, and also a hired killer who has decided to quit his job. The lives of the two intertwine, not least because the killer’s first hit was the playboy’s father. Lots of twists, turns, and references to Dvorak’s ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’. There’s also great interplay between the religious and secular influences in contemporary Istanbul. But (maybe) the single best plot point features a novelist named Selçuk Altun, whom the playboy finds overbearing and pompous, but who gives him clues about the death of his father. Good story and a fast read.
My Name is Red
There are lots of great Orhan Pamuk novels out there. My Name is Red, published more than two decades ago, is an amazing work that retains its power. It’s a mystery, beginning with a dead body in a well. It’s also a painstaking recreation of life in Constantinople in the late 16th century. And it’s a meditation on the nature of seeing, the role of art in a society hostile to it, and the gap between human aspiration and divine knowledge. At the centre of the novel is Black, who has returned to the city after a period of exile, and who is still in love with his cousin, Shekure. She married and had two sons in his absence, but her husband is missing and presumed dead. At the novel’s heart are the illuminators of Islamic manuscripts. Their traditional ways of illustration are under threat from the west and a new, more ‘realistic’ style of painting. This clash leads to some of the most beautiful writing in the book. We will return to this one again and again.
What are your favourite novels by Turkish authors?
