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240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
Can’t the woman spend one single day in this world without being afraid of something!The last time I read a work of Turkish literature, the family to which both main narrators were related was a self-imposed matriarchy that started the book as a mystical confabulation of fate and ended as a defense mechanism against patriarchy. I mentioned The Arabian Nights and My Brilliant Friend having a drinking contest in a previous update, and I stand by that for this work's engagement with what it really means to grow up as a young woman in a changing time of djinns and education and a family that considers you insane if you try to talk and/or resist having your virginity physically examined. The work covers up more in the vein of TAN than MBF, but the myriad places in which the young woman Dirmit is shut up and cut down and intellectually violated while being expected to support the family via intellectual endeavors will break your fucking heart.
She became stuck over the question of why her brother, who was two years younger than her, had gone to see a woman. The fact that he might have died as a result didn’t bother her: she was troubled because she couldn’t go herself and see a man.Okay, so I'm the type to see patriarchal domination everywhere, but it still remains to be seen what the reviewers were smoking when they spouted off names like Beckett and Márquez. The first is, uh, look bro, if you're going to describe the Künstlerroman of a young girl as a "nihilistic wit", that says a lot more about your opinions of female writers than the book itself (the stretch is to the point where I wonder if this person has even read Beckett. The world may never know). I can get a lot more out of the second, but that doesn't prevent it from being super effing lazy in the vein of "Oh this person also incorporates past with present while happening to lie sorta outside the Eurocentric framework of doing so so obviously they're all in the same category," as if Turkey and Colombia and other enculturated worlds with their own wars of religion and politics and folktales were just these things people delved into in expectation of the same weird thing all day every day ugh. Thank heavens then for the introduction which, while admittedly dancing around the gynephobic brutality interlacing the inherited superstitions, at least gave me a decent context in the vein of history and writing and cataclysms of beliefs in all their veins and platforms. Sure, it's not as stirring as Look! Nobel Prize for Lit Winner connection! But the author's still alive, so there's hope for her yet that doesn't need to be patronized by cookie cutter comparisons.
At last Dirmit came upon a way. One by one, she took the words from her head and put them into her heart. When a word made her heart pound she wrote it down at once. When it had no effect she cast it out.A number of readers will probably be perturbed by the hints at the Eurocentric borderlands just outside the this narrative framework of commonists and Coca-Cola. Good.