Online bookshop - The Idle Years by Orhan
Kemal, translated by Cengiz Lugal
Foreword by Orhan Pamuk
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Online bookshop
by Orhan Kemal, transalted by Cengiz Lugal
Foreword by Orhan Pamuk
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The Idle Years
by Orhan Kemal translated by Cengiz Lugal (Peter Owen)
It is a great pleasure to welcome an English translation of
Orhan Kemal’s Yýllar, a delightful novel, or rather two
linked autobiographical novels, about growing up in the
1920s and 1930s, a classic account of the hardships and fun
of Turkish provincial life. The nameless narrator vividly
recounts the story of his life from infancy to marriage
against the backdrop of the early Republic. His initially
well-to-do family loses its money, endures several years of
exile in Beirut, but he always holds on to his hope and
vitality. The concluding scene, in which the newly married
narrator and his wife have to give back the borrowed gold
displayed at their wedding, but are consoled that they have
each other, epitomises the bittersweet but never sentimental
spirit of the novel.
Orhan Kemal’s Turkish captures the voices and the humanity
of his characters so well that they ring in the memory long
afterwards. Turning these voices into 21st-century English
is no easy task, but Cengiz Lugal has produced a version
which at last gives English-speaking readers a chance to
discover Orhan Kemal and his world for themselves.
David Barchard, Cornucopia 41
From the publisher:
Orhan Kemal is one of Turkey's best-loved writers, with a
standing equal to Charles Dickens in England. These are the
first two semi-autobiographical novels in a series, set in
the 1920s and 1930s when Turkey was undergoing major social
change. The unnamed narrator grows up in an affluent
household in an Adana village with his brother,two sisters,
mother and formidable father, a known political agitator,
but the family are forced to migrate to Beirut on account of
his activities. The boy develops into a rebellious and
feckless teenager, reluctantly attempting to support his now
impoverished family through menial work while resenting his
father's stern attempts to control him. Eventually lack of
money provokes him and his best friend to set off for
Istanbul to look for work. Before long he has developed into
an alienated and self-conscious adolescent, preoccupied by
his scrawny appearance, ragged clothes and lack of prospects
— and he soon has to make a humiliating return. The fact
that his father is well born but notorious does not help him
make his way in the world and things begin to look up only
when he falls for a pretty young factory girl...
The most famous of Kemal's writings in Turkey, this is the
first time that it has been published in English and it
features a foreword by 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk.
'Suffused though they are with the dark realities of
poverty, Orhan Kemal's novels are celebrations of this other
world. The optimism I find in them comes not from literature
but from life itself.' - Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Kemal(1914-1970) was born in Adana. His father worked
in law and was active in politics, but Kemal dabbled in
menial jobs before military service.
His imprisonment due to his outspoken political views proved
a turning point and from 1951 he made his living entirely by
writing — often with radical, anti-authoritarian content. An
institution in his homeland (though barely tolerated by
successive governments),Kemal's untimely death in 1970 was
an occasion for national mourning. |
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