The Idle Years — A Short Novel from Turkey
|
|
Orhan Kemal would not be one of the widely known names of
Turkish literature in the West, unlike his semi name-share,
Orhan Pamuk, or even Yashar Kemal. He is the author of 28
novels and many short stories, most often dealing with the
lives of the working poor in Turkey in the 1920s to the
1960s.
 The
Idle Years, 1950, translated by Cengiz Lugal, is one of his
earliest, and a good introduction to his themes and style.
Using parts of Kemal’s own life, the unnamed narrator is a
very poor young man in the port city of Adana, where Turkey
turns from east-west to north-south, continuing on to Syria
and Lebanon. Unhappy in high school he and two friends take
a 5 day boat trip to the great city of Istanbul, hoping to
find work and to experience the world. The extremes of
poverty he suffers, and descriptions of his parent’s poverty
in Jerusalem where the father is in exile for political
activities in Turkey, rival George Orwell’s well known Down
and Out in Paris and London.
Giving up and returning, as much from lack of direction and
ambition as actual lack of work, he returns ot Adana where
he falls in love, from a simple sighting, with an immigrant
factory girl. The courtship consists of following her home
and standing outside her door. By the time she notices,
everyone in the neighborhood has also. Death threats begin.
The girl is interested, purely on seeing from her window and
his proven interest in her. She gets word to him that his
family must come to her father and ask for her hand. When he
asks his grandmother to speak for him, she is appalled. The
girl is only a factory worker. She may have slept with
thousands of men already! And he comes from an important
family!
The narrator prevails through a lucky encounter with a
friend who had a great influence on him earlier and had then
disappeared but who turns out to be a close friend of the
girl’s father. The wedding takes place and as if by a
miracle gifts apear from his own family: gold, pendants,
bracelets, carpets. The young couple is delerious and plan a
wealthy life together until the grandmother appears and
tells them everything has been borrowed — to put on a good
face– and must be returned.
The novel ends as they realize they have nothing but each
other, and that is enough.
The Idle Years is a short novel of only 135 pages and has
none of the complexity or mystery or tension building
familiar in most modern fiction. Aside from some very
revealing passages of self-doubt by the narrator there is
not much character development. But for a look into the
working lives, and risks of the time and place — one man is
severely injured by a flying shuttle in a weaving factory;
the apprentice work is unpaid labor– this is a fine novel,
and worth adding to the short list of interesting writing
about the lives of other than the middle classes.
The biographical note tells us that Kemal ”…went on to
explore … the problems of farm and factory workers, the
alientation of migrant workers in the big cities, the lives
of prison inmates, blind devotion to duty, child poverty and
the exploitation and repression of women.”
An author for anyone interested in Turkey and the
generations that helped build the current one, or the
working poor anywhere in the world. I’ll be reading more of
him. |
|
|