The Idle Years
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The Idle Years
By Orhan Kemal
Trans. Cengiz Lugal
Peter Owen Publishers
223 pp.
The Idle Years is Orhan Kemal’s largely autobiographical
story of a wealthy Turkish family forced into exile on
account of the father’s politics. The family, husband and
wife with their two sons and two daughters, moves to Beirut
and there falls into extreme poverty. This is a bleak book
about the common man’s struggle to keep himself afloat in a
world that cares little for his fate, about people without
enough money for decent clothing and children looking on
helplessly as their mother dies of some treatable disease.
This is the world of the down-and-out in all their
wretchedness: its pages are full of teenage prostitutes,
empty stomachs, nighttime soccer matches, class snobbery and
evil factory managers.
The novel is written in the first-person, the narrator being
the family’s youngest son. He begins by recounting the
pleasantries of his early childhood in Adana, a city in
southern Turkey, which included being caned by his father
and locked up in a room under the stairway for days on end
with nothing but a Koran. The boy’s life is one difficulty
after another, and at one point he attempts to take his
frustrations out on the family cat by drowning it at a
nearby fountain. He then accompanies his family to Beirut
where he works briefly at a printing press, but returns to
Adana alone a short time later to live with his grandmother
and continue his schooling. In reality he does everything
but go to school, instead spending his days in the company
of other young men causing trouble in restaurants, trying
various stints in manual labor, and of course playing
soccer, but always ‘stuffing their faces one day, starving
the next.’
This is a book without any clear political message, though
no one could read it without seeing clearly that it is a
political book. Its focus is class, and the snobbery and
blindness that always accompany class feeling. The author
knows that for the most part there is little difference
between the rich man and the poor man besides the amount of
money each has inherited: the lower class children with whom
the narrator plays do not have the same manners as he does,
but they are just as bright, if not brighter, than the more
well-off children. At the same time, a member of the upper
class who has fallen on hard times cannot simply adopt the
life of a worker willy-nilly, since he is inevitably caught
in an upper class mentality that includes, for example, a
manual labor fetish and the need to keep up appearances at
all costs.
This is something that can only be shrugged with a great
deal of effort, and the narrator of The Idle Years is in the
end unable to do it. The lives of working people are not to
be taken up and put on like a pair of pants: by the end of
the novel, the narrator’s hands are still ‘soft’ and his
body will not endure the task of a full day shoveling
gravel. |
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