{"id":27490,"date":"2023-07-24T08:15:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T06:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=27490"},"modified":"2023-07-24T08:15:45","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T06:15:45","slug":"literature-takes-courage-on-ahmet-altans-lady-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/literature-takes-courage-on-ahmet-altans-lady-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Literature Takes Courage: on Ahmet Altan\u2019s Lady Life<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kaya Gen\u00e7’s review of Lady Life<\/em> first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a> and is published here by arrangement with LARB.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lady Life<\/em><\/a>, by Ahmet Altan
\nPenguin
\nISBN 9781635422887<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kaya Gen\u00e7<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

IN 2016, Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey\u2019s leading novelists, fell victim to the Turkish government\u2019s post-coup purges. Cops detained Altan at his home in Istanbul, drove him to a police station (and confessed to being fans of his books on the way), and locked the author up in a basement prison populated by hundreds of shocked dissidents. Altan had to wait two years before a judge handed him a sentence: life in prison without parole. His crime? Attempting to topple the government using \u201csubliminal messages.\u201d Fifty-one Nobel laureates, including Kazuo Ishiguro and J. M. Coetzee, signed an open letter calling for Altan\u2019s release.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ahmet Altan’s Lady Life<\/em><\/a> is published by Penguin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Luckily, Altan\u00a0<\/span>got out,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but only after spending four years and seven months inside a cell. He was 71 when freed in April 2021. In captivity, his fierce mood didn\u2019t diminish, and he wrote three books:\u00a0<\/span>I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(2019);\u00a0<\/span>Zar<\/span><\/i>, a yet unpublished historical novel; and\u00a0<\/span>Lady Life<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(2021), a novella that documents the widespread purges that began in the wake of the failed 2016 coup and subsided with the opposition victories in 2019\u2019s mayoral elections.\u00a0<\/span>I Will Never See the World Again\u00a0<\/span><\/i>was translated by Yasemin \u00c7ongar and published by Other Press in October 2019, and now the same duo have brought us an English translation of\u00a0<\/span>Lady Life<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Lady Life\u00a0<\/span><\/i>may trigger its Turkish readers. I identified with its hero, Faz\u0131l, an impressionable college student whose life goal is to become a literary critic. He reminded me of myself in college and what I saw with my own eyes in the late 2010s. Faz\u0131l\u2019s problems begin when his father goes bankrupt overnight after a \u201cmajor country\u201d announces it will stop the import of tomatoes from Turkey. This is based on reality: in January 2016, Russia\u00a0<\/span>imposed a tomato-import embargo<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on Turkey after an Islamist militant aligned with Turkish soldiers downed a Russian fighter jet in 2015. With thousands of acres of his land turned into a \u201cscarlet-colored dump,\u201d Faz\u0131l\u2019s father loses all the money he had invested in the crop. The following day, a stroke delivers the bankrupted man to the grave.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Feeling like he\u2019s \u201cfree-falling in an unfamiliar void,\u201d Faz\u0131l has no idea what he is falling toward. In the course of the book, he finds out he is not alone in this free fall. Lives are changing overnight everywhere in Turkey, a country driving headlong toward economic collapse and pervasive authoritarianism. The days of luxury are over for Faz\u0131l and the Turks, who, after enjoying the benefits of neoliberal capitalism for years, are now being damaged by its demise.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>One week after his father\u2019s funeral, Faz\u0131l boards a bus to Istanbul and heads to Pera, the city\u2019s refuge for the politically and sexually marginalized. He finds \u201ca room for rent on a street of dive bars [\u2026] in a six-story building from the nineteenth century.\u201d Purple wisteria climbs the face of the building, which houses a non-functioning \u201cwooden elevator [\u2026] in its antique cage.\u201d Faz\u0131l sells all his clothes and books; even his laptop and mobile phone are gone.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Altan sketches the daily life of Pera in attractively drawn vignettes. As Faz\u0131l sits on his room\u2019s small balcony, we survey the cobblestone street with him:<\/span><\/p>\n

A cloud of anise, tobacco, and fried fish drifted up. There were sounds of laughter, whistles, joyful whoops. It was as if once you entered that scene, anything that happened outside was forgotten, and a transient bliss enveloped everyone. I watched from afar that fleeting vivacity in which I could no longer take part.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the boarding house, Faz\u0131l befriends G\u00fcls\u00fcm, a cross-dresser; \u201cPoet,\u201d a young dissident who edits an opposition magazine; and \u201cMogambo,\u201d a handbag seller of African origin. To support his education, Faz\u0131l finds part-time work with a casting agency. After his classes, he heads to a studio to participate as a spectator in a program premised on filming dancing people on a podium. Before the shoot ends, Faz\u0131l notices a feminine face on the screen: \u201c[It] had a teasing joviality about it, as if she were getting ready to crack a joke. She seemed on the brink of laughter.\u201d Infatuated with the 40-something woman in the honey-colored dress, he accepts her offer to share a meal.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>This leads to a friendship with benefits. Hayat Han\u0131m (\u201cLady Life\u201d), whose life philosophy is carpe diem, seems like a character from a medieval romance. The narrator rolls the name around in his mind, thinking, \u201c<\/span>Hayat Han\u0131m,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0I repeated to myself in all the languages I could:\u00a0<\/span>Hayat Han\u0131m, Lady Life, Madame la Vie, Signora la Vita, Se\u00f1ora la Vida<\/span><\/i>.\u201d Her knowledge of life comes from documentaries: she knows, for example, that \u201csome wood frogs completely freeze in winter, fall and break their icy bodies like a piece of china, but come back to life and are healed in the summer,\u201d and \u201cthat leopards fight with baboons.\u201d When she learns that Faz\u0131l studies literature, Hayat says she gets bored with novels: \u201cI already know the things novelists write. What I know about people is enough for me.\u201d She has \u201cnever heard of Faulkner, Proust, or Henry James.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n


\n<\/span>Amid poverty, loneliness, and desperation, Faz\u0131l notices the emergence of a terrifying group of pro-government thugs. These bearded men, who carry baseball bats to beat dissidents on the streets, are fashioned after the notorious sopal\u0131 vigilante groups, a trademark of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who organized armed Kurdish groups against Armenians in the 1890s. Turkey\u2019s president, Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, who adores Hamid, resurrected sopal\u0131 during the Gezi protests in 2013. From a 19th-century balcony in Pera, almost a replica of Faz\u0131l\u2019s, I watched men with sticks beat rebels on the streets in July of that year. Faz\u0131l watches as they attack an \u201cart gallery in broad daylight, beat everyone inside, saying\u00a0<\/span>You can\u2019t drink liquor here<\/span><\/i>, and destro[y] the artwork.\u201d Expressing their hatred for \u201call kinds of entertainment,\u201d these men \u201chated everyone who wasn\u2019t like them.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Gentrification of Istanbul delivers another blow to Faz\u0131l. The arcade where he buys secondhand books now resembles \u201ca patient on his deathbed.\u201d The bookseller informs him that \u201c[n]o one comes here anymore,\u201d and so \u201c[t]hey will soon demolish the building anyway.\u201d For an aspiring literary critic, this is terrible news: \u201cPeople had abandoned books. I never thought this could happen. No matter what, there were people who would always love books, but they weren\u2019t there today.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Faz\u0131l\u2019s new classmate from the literature faculty, S\u0131la, shares his pessimism. She\u2019s a playful bookworm who, in their first meeting, asks him: \u201cIf you could have written any fifteen pages of literature from the whole of history, which fifteen pages would you choose?\u201d Faz\u0131l notices that S\u0131la\u2019s test resembles the riddle of the hat in Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Little Prince<\/span><\/i>: only those who notice the drawing of the hat is actually the image of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant can be trusted: \u201cWe would become friends if I gave the right answer; if not, she would lose all interest in me.\u201d Eventually, his response \u2014 the \u201cTime Passes\u201d chapters in Virginia Woolf\u2019s <\/span>To the Lighthouse <\/span><\/i>\u2014 impresses S\u0131la enough to make them lovers.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>While Faz\u0131l\u2019s difficulties are financial, S\u0131la\u2019s come from being a member of a family politically demonized by the government. Thanks to her father, once the proprietor of a major company, she spent her childhood in an orchard-covered villa. But after a minor partner in the firm is arrested on charges of \u201cconspiracy against the government,\u201d her world turns upside down. Authorities, spotting an opportunity, detain her father and confiscate all their savings before taking over his entire business. With a single suitcase, the family spends the night of the raid at a park nearby: \u201cThat morning we were wealthy, even at dinnertime that day we were wealthy, but by midnight we had become homeless, penniless paupers.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>This Cinderella scenario, where their posh lives turn into a pumpkin at midnight, leads S\u0131la\u2019s father to work at the wholesale vegetable market as a middleman, buying and selling bruised fruits and vegetables. His daughter\u2019s only hope now is her cousin Hakan, who is in Canada for a year on a scholarship. She plans to join him there.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>At the literature faculty, one of their professors, Nermin Han\u0131m, stylish in black skintight jeans and red stilettos, peppers her lectures with truisms. \u201cLiterature can\u2019t be taught,\u201d she proposes. \u201cWhat I\u00a0<\/span>will<\/span><\/i> teach you is what one badly needs in dealing with literature, and that is literary courage. Don\u2019t try to exist by repeating other people\u2019s phrases. Be brave. Literature takes courage; great writers emerge from among those who write with courage.\u201d It\u2019s unnerving and saddening to watch S\u0131la and Faz\u0131l search for the meaning of their lives in the works of Flaubert, Chekhov, and Tolstoy in a culture where loyalty to an autocrat has become the sole remaining public value.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Altan writes voraciously about sex. \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop touching her,\u201d Faz\u0131l says of Lady Hayat. To him, she is a \u201cmythological goddess whose name was yet to be added to the dictionary.\u201d Although she is not classically beautiful (Altan recalls Proust\u2019s words while describing her: \u201cLet us leave pretty women to men with no imagination\u201d), her body casts an arcane spell on him. He has to touch and hold her to feel alive.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>But soon reality intervenes, smashing Faz\u0131l\u2019s dreams of a life devoted to Joseph Conrad and cunnilingus. Cops raid the boardinghouse one day before dawn, taking away two guys who live on the first floor who posted critical articles on Facebook. Faz\u0131l describes his plight through an unsettling simile: \u201cIt was as if we were sitting in the palm of a giant who, whenever he wanted, could make a fist and crush us in it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n


\n<\/span>To read Altan\u2019s novel is to observe, from a remove, the shifting moods of a young man undergoing a spiritual crisis.\u00a0<\/span>Lady Life<\/span><\/i>\u2019s unfussy prose reminded me of Herman Hesse\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Steppenwolf<\/span><\/i>. Altan\u2019s young characters are also at intersections of their lives, aware that a misstep may prove too costly. \u201cMy feelings changed rapidly,\u201d Faz\u0131l muses, before coming up with an image that chilled me in the wake of the recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey: \u201cI resembled a building whose foundation had cracked in a major quake, I thought, so that things in that building were no longer safe and reliable.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>But it is S\u0131la\u2019s disintegration that is most upsetting. When Faz\u0131l buys her 100 grams of orange chocolate truffles and two marrons d\u00e9guis\u00e9s \u2014 a luxury she had been deprived of for long \u2014 she is brought to tears: \u201cI can\u2019t stand that a hundred grams of chocolate is making me <\/span>so<\/span><\/i> happy.\u201d A more considerable humiliation for her is watching her family\u2019s former driver, Yakup, rise up the ladder of the new Turkey as a contractor, making millions thanks to his older brother, the deputy chief of the district\u2019s ruling party. S\u0131la is terrified that party members will take her only remaining belongings \u2014 her plans for escape \u2014 yet they take something of greater value: her father. His lawyers are arrested, too. When S\u0131la and Faz\u0131l visit the large, fortress-like police department, a cop holding a machine gun tells them off in a threatening tone. They wait four days, taking turns to go home and change their clothes. When the father finally emerges, he has a scraggly beard and a \u201cpale face, sunken eyes. His clothes were dirty.\u201d Inside, says the forlorn man, the police had \u201cmade [him] sign a paper declaring [he] won\u2019t sue them to take back [his] property.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Another morning, police raid the room of Faz\u0131l\u2019s friend Poet. He escapes to a balcony, where Faz\u0131l sees him in his \u201cflimsy shirt\u201d before their eyes meet: \u201cI saw the reflection of clouds on his face. I stretched my hand out to him, but we were too far apart. Suddenly, he pushed the wall he was leaning against and let himself go.\u201d Now burdened with responsibility and guilt, Faz\u0131l devotes himself to dissident publishing, a choice that lifts the lid off life in Turkey for him.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Thanks to his new editorial post, Faz\u0131l can see, in microscopic detail, the truth of his repressive country. He finds \u201can entirely disparate mode of existence [\u2026] a life that resembled what people referred to as Hell.\u201d He notices \u201cfathers [\u2026] committing suicide with their families, sharing cyanide with their wives and children\u201d out of sheer desperation; starved people setting themselves on fire in public; hungry children begging on the roads; \u201cworkers [\u2026] sacked with no severance pay.\u201d All of these stark incidents were \u201cbeing kept under the cover of a terrifying silence. Daily papers, TV shows, newscasts did not talk about these things. People were free to set themselves on fire because they were starving, but it was forbidden to talk about these acts of suicide.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Altan shows, with remarkable skill, how the smallest details of life are saturated in a creeping autocracy. When the arcade housing Faz\u0131l\u2019s beloved secondhand booksellers is replaced by a \u201cmud-filled ditch,\u201d he feels violated:<\/span><\/p>\n

I had come to this arcade many times over the years, browsing the shops and inhaling dust and the smell of old paper, bought many of my favorite books here, observing on their pages the traces left by their owners before me, imagining what might have gone through their minds when they read those paragraphs, leaving my own traces.<\/span><\/p>\n

He says that it feels as if the gentrifiers \u201chad entered [his] home at night, destroyed everything, written threats on the ruined walls that they would be back. That\u2019s how it felt to [him].\u201d In academia, too, oppression prevails. Nermin Han\u0131m and Kaan Bey, Faz\u0131l and S\u0131la\u2019s favorite literature professors, are arrested for signing a peace petition: \u201cAll fifty of the professors who signed it were taken from their homes before dawn.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>All that horror, those of us who refuse to leave Istanbul well know, is based on reality. As the country is remade for the likes of Yakup, the former driver of S\u0131la, the sensitive and the creative lose their wealth and freedom. Yakup hires a driver who shares his name, and by shouting orders to another Yakup, the newly rich man presumably feels he is taking revenge for his own past \u2014 a form of resentment that Islamism\u2019s reign in Turkey promotes and legitimizes. \u201cIf one has commercial sagacity making money is easy-peasy,\u201d says Yakup, and thinks, \u201cthis country has never been in better shape.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Faz\u0131l and S\u0131la agree there\u2019s no future in Turkey for them. Everything had been shifting over the past decade, but now it seems \u201cas though the pace of change ha[s] increased.\u201d They aren\u2019t unlike frogs being slowly boiled to death. Altan writes beautifully about the mood surrounding departure and self-exile, that hardest of decisions. Faz\u0131l conjures an \u201cimage of a ship [\u2026] a large vessel getting ready with the tiniest of maneuvers for its final hawser to be withdrawn in order to leave the dock.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Yet Istanbul refuses to let go. Wandering the city, Faz\u0131l notices the warm weather, the blossoming trees, the playful clouds passing over the sky. \u201cThe cool smell\u201d of the Bosphorus engulfs him. At the same time, Faz\u0131l is torn between the two women in his life. Lady Hayat, for whom \u201c[t]here\u2019s nothing to understand\u201d and \u201c[w]hat you see is what you get,\u201d urges him to leave Turkey promptly: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be able to live with myself if you ended up in prison.\u201d With S\u0131la, who enjoys \u201cgetting into long arguments about all kinds of things\u201d with him, a life elsewhere together is an attractive proposition.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Will they leave or not? Does it matter? Suffice it to say that the book\u2019s ending packs a punch. Closing\u00a0<\/span>Lady Life<\/span><\/i>, I imagined Altan writing the final words in prison, presumably home to hundreds of Faz\u0131ls who couldn\u2019t afford to leave: \u201cI am waiting. I am here.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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