Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (review)

Tales of Crossed Destinies makes an invaluable contribution to the nascent critical corpus on modern Turkish literature. Seyhan's work establishes itself as the first cogent study in English that offers a critical analysis of the modern Turkish novel in tandem with the social and political histories of the nation. Drawing on the theories of the novel genre developed by such theorists and writers as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Milan Kundera, Friedrich Schlegel, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar among others, the author goes beyond what she calls "the convenient binaries and periodizations" that have been utilized to critically engage in the study of modern Turkish literature (8). Seyhan offers compelling analyses of seventeen works of Turkish literature ranging from prerepublican novels to contemporary ones, and writes against the tropes of "belatedness" and "imitation" that are often used to characterize the modern Turkish novel. Above all, Tales of Crossed Destinies is a penetrating testament to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's claim that "in the literature of a people making a transition from one civilization to another there is always something exemplary and interesting for other nations" (17).

One of the strongest aspects of Tales of Crossed Destinies is the array of texts it examines. To a certain extent this selection is dictated by the availability of Turkish novels in English translation. It is highly commendable that Seyhan has selected quite a few texts on which there is little, if any, scholarly work in English. English-speaking readers will have a chance to get acquainted with authors like Bilge Karasu, the great allegorist whose work has been compared to that of Orwell, Kundera, and Saramago; Adalet Ağaoğlu, who weaves history and personal destiny in her novels with poetic finesse; Mahmut Makal, one of the best representatives of "village literature" in Turkey; Aziz Nesin, claimed by most critics to be Turkey's finest philosophical and political satirist; Latife Tekin, who amalgamates magic realism with her "extraordinary world of words" as Seyhan puts it; and postmodernist Aslı Erdoğan (172). On the other end of the spectrum we find authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Yaşar Kemal, and Orhan Pamuk who have enjoyed wider recognition and have seen a greater number of scholarly publications on their oeuvre but who at the same time have suffered from overinterpretation.

All five chapters following the introductory first chapter establish a congruence between literary and national histories. The historical context for each novel under discussion is aphoristically delivered and constitutes a solid foundation for both intra- and transnational comparisons among a myriad of novels. The second and third chapters, entitled "Emergence of the Turkish Novel from the Spirit of Cultural Reform" and "Growing Pains of the Nation," respectively, are especially steeped in the historical specificities of the late Ottoman and early Turkish years. In addition to providing a panorama of the founding social and political principles of the Turkish nation and the consequent traumas and conflicts that were born of this period, Seyhan uses these two chapters to trace the genesis of some of the paradoxes, crises, and dilemmas that have emerged within the Turkish national psyche and subsequently in the political arena of the recent years.

The novels under discussion in the third chapter belong to the early republican era and, as the author ably demonstrates, prove particularly prescient with respect to the current social and political problems Turkey faces. Seyhan believes that the social, political, and cultural discontinuities engendered by the transition from a Muslim empire to a secular nation, crises on the national and personal levels brought about by a rapid and ungrounded modernization, and the challenges of conciliating Islam with democracy and secularism constitute the threads that mark the modern Turkish novel. The works discussed in this chapter—Halide Edib Adıvar's Shirt of Flame and The Memoirs of Halide Edib, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's The...