The World's Literature in India discussion

Summer's End by Adalet Ağaoğlu, a Turkish novel set in the Eastern Mediterranean town of Side (a subject in itself), begins dream-like with imaginings of the doings inside a shuttered summer house. How this story will go will be interesting to discover. Another English-translated work by the same author is Curfew: A Novel.

These recommended books received votes in our June-Oct 2013 poll:

Memed, My Hawk,

The Forty Rules of Love,

Poems of Nazım Hikmet,

Life's Good, Brother: A Novel,

The Turks Today

I intend to read Memed, My Hawk in maybe July or August, if anyone would like to read along at the same time.

My summer commitments are growing. I will feature it for June-October. You could start the thread!

I finally finished listening to the audio for Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. The book has been in print ten years, but the audio is new from April. It chronicles his childhood in Istanbul up until the moment he decided he wanted to be a writer, and I thought it added some nice context to his novels.

I have a poetry collection by Birhan Keskin & Silk & Love & Flame. Birhan Keskin, which George Messo translated. I've read some of his translations and parts of his blog. In fact, I'm a fan. So, this new collection definitely is in my short list.

For biography buffs, poetry addicts, or Turco-philes, the very new biography Nâzim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet is published. Planning to read a review then get my mitts on it.

I found an older edition of some of Hikmet's poetry on paperbackswap.com. I actually also found some of Nakim's short stories (most of his stuff remains untranslated.) I came across a mention of him in the Great Railway Bazaar along with Kemal.

Jenny,
What are your thoughts about The Great Railway Bazaar and The Sheen on the Silk?

I don't know the Anne Perry but enjoyed what I've read so far of The Great Railway Bazaar more than I expected. Lots of literary references!

I just finished reading In Turkey I Am Beautiful by Brendan Shanahan, a journalist who had spent time in Turkey prior to the time he spent to write this book. There are several chapters just about the rug trade, since he worked in a shop in Istanbul for a while. He also goes to eastern Turkey during the turmoil with the PKK, has some comments on the Kars of reality vs. the Kars of Pamuk in Snow, and I learned some tidbits on religious sects, slang, etc.

Nice review, Jenny. I noted In Turkey I Am Beautiful in timeoutistanbul. The author seems to have covered the entire country.

Asma wrote: "Nice review, Jenny. I noted In Turkey I Am Beautiful in timeoutistanbul. The author seems to have covered the entire country."
Yes. I think it helps that he'd made so many contacts that helped him with people in each place.

Today I flipped through Turquoise: A Chef's Travels in Turkey, which strangely follows a similar trek to In Turkey I Am Beautiful, although skipping a lot of the eastern part of the country. Don't look here for a Turkish cookbook; it's more of a chef's take on Turkish cuisine, but wow the photography is so beautiful.

I'm sad i haven't been able to participate much in this year's Turkey trip. :(

Jenny wrote: "Today I flipped through Turquoise: A Chef's Travels in Turkey..."

How exciting that sounds, Jenny. I am going to take a browse in that one.

Marieke wrote: "I'm sad i haven't been able to participate much in this year's Turkey trip. :("

M, you had read some of the novels already, but I did miss you.

I have had an odd year and my participation has been low everywhere on good reads. :(

Here's to changing that in 2014!

I got in two more Turkish books through interlibrary loan yesterday, and they are surprisingly linked. In my Turkish cooking class, we watched a video in YouTube about the Turkish tea tradition. I looked the speaker up and it turns out she had written a book, Yes, I Would...: An American Woman's Letters to Turkey. I had also requested The Turkish Embassy Letters, written by the British Ambassador's Wife in 1716.

Apparently Branning wrote her book to mirror the first. Perhaps I knew this when I requested them and then forgot, but I was pretty surprised by it yesterday when I picked them up. I actually think I requested the embassy letters after either a post here or doing a very general search in Amazon.

As we end the year, I'm hoping to read at least three more Turkish books from my pile - these two and a Shafak.

Marieke wrote: "I have had an odd year and my participation has been low everywhere on good reads. :(

Here's to changing that in 2014!"

Aha! A New Year's Resolution...

Jenny wrote: "I got in two more Turkish books through interlibrary loan yesterday, and they are surprisingly linked. In my Turkish cooking class, we watched a video in YouTube about the Turkish tea tradition. I..."

Really enjoyed the illustrated talk about Turkish tea by the cookbook author on YT, Jenny.

What a brief time we have been engaged with the literary and cultural life in Turkey. The Turkish Embassy Letters are a must! Thank you so much for commenting about those books.

For in-depth literary coverage from Turkey, I highly recommend the goodreads group Turkish Reading Challenges. Besides insight into the books, there is a great opportunity to read and write the language.

Woah thanks!

Rica ederim.

Asma wrote: "Rica ederim."

Tamam!

Mehmet Âkif Ersoy , Yahya Kemal Beyatli, Aziz Nesin, and Enis Batur are new to me: Contemporary Turkish Literature Major Authors.

Jenny wrote: "...Today I flipped through Turquoise: A Chef's Travels in Turkey..."

The coffee-table-sized descriptive/cookery book about Turkey by the chefs Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf is very tempting to the eye and (maybe) to the palette. I'm going to keep this book until I need to return it. What an unusual title, reminiscent of sky saturating the land and sea with that brilliance.

Back to Turkey with two books of letters from women, two outsider perspectives of Turkey from two different centuries.

One is a travel writing classic from 1716 - The Turkish Embassy Letters. This was an interesting take on Turkey, but more than that, a very interesting inside look at the daily life of the incredibly wealthy of the 18th century. My review is here.

Following that, Yes, I Would...: An American Woman's Letters to Turkey by Katharine Branning - modeled after the first, written in 2010. Katharine, a librarian and traveler, writes TO Lady Mary of the first set of novels, to applaud some of her experiences and to correct her in others. I learned a lot about an outsider view of Turkey this way, but it was a little forced at times. My review is here.

Before the year is out, I have 2-3 more Turkish books to go. Woohoo!

I'm cross posting this with another group, but just wanted to say I have finished writing my wrap-up post for just what I did with books from Turkey. In the end, I read 20 books from Turkey but it feels like so much more. Some of them are from this group, and some are not. I also included information in my blog about my cooking and language adventures.

Honestly, I'd be up for a second year of Turkey! So much ground still to cover....

Jenny wrote: "...Honestly, I'd be up for a second year of Turkey! So much ground still to cover..."

Yes, there is so much more to read here. I'm making this topic the Turkey Study Group. Or, wait until a specific theme crops up, like Turkish carpets, postmodern Turkish novels, the Ottomans, or something else.

For enthusiastic readers of Orhan Pamuk's fiction and nonfiction, there is his The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures. About it, he says, "My interest here is to explain my understanding of the genre known as the "novel.""

The beginning addresses the literariness of the book's title, which he decidedly attributes to Friedrich von Schiller's late-eighteenth-century essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. That essay is published with another Schiller essay, On the Sublime .

As for this particular Pamuk book, the opening chapters distinguish between writers who compose uncritically and unconsciously and those who compose while attending to technique, to the effect on readers, etc. This dichotomy also applies to the reading style, readers "naively unaware [it's all autobiography] or sentimentally reflective [it's all fiction]". The sought-for reader adopts a balance between naive and sentimental reading styles, actively wondering which parts of the fiction originate in the novelist's own sensory experience, evident in novelistic details, and which parts originate in the novelist's pure imagination. In a further chapter, character, plot, and time are developed.

Serendipitously, I encountered similar titles to Pamuk's and Schiller's. There's the poem "Naive and sentimental painting" by Ileana Mălăncioiu in When the Tunnels Meet: Contemporary Romanian Poetry; there's John Le Carré's fiction, The Naive and Sentimental Lover: A Novel. Apparently, the phrase is attractive to writers and readers.

Again, Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist is the publication of Pamuk's lecture series. He sees novel writing to have its origin in the visual imagination, so that a novelist is a painter whose medium is words. If s/he can't describe the imagined scene in words, then the image won't make it into the novel. It all begins with the mind's pictorial image and ends with the reader's sharing the same image through the novelist's words. The process is explained in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 6, the center of the novel is not a theme. Finding this meaningful connection among the novel's events/characters is a sort of pleasurable wish fulfillment for each distinct reader or writer, as such meaningful connectors in real life might be an impossibility. And, the center may change, as reader/writer explore the nooks and crannies of the scenario.

Epilogue of Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

According to the author, the book's goal

"has been to explore the effects that novels have on their readers, how novelists work, and how novels are written...[O]f two books that could serve as models for these lectures...first was E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel...The other book I had in mind was The Theory of the Novel...by György Lukács..."

Another interesting fact is the Epilogue calls The Black Book an autobiographical fiction. It might be on the Group Bookshelf.