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language: Turkish (English tr. Maureen Freely)
country: Turkey
year: 1945
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 6.6.22-9.6.22
Suat Derviş’s In the Shadow of the Yalı (originally published in 1945) was quite a ride. it’s 303 pages but it never felt like it — Maureen Freely, the translator, describes it as “breathy” and for all its claustrophobic narration that really does feel like an appropriate word. the style is conversational and the result is something that moves you through a lot of emotions very quickly — which is appropriate given that its characters are themselves caught up in a whirlwind of emotions.
in some ways this is a conventional realist romantic drama: Celile has an affair with Muhsin and things fall apart. the fact that Derviş was a socialist feminist, though, shows throughout the novel in its emphasis on the importance of class and money — both in the broader context of early republican Turkish society (with Muhsin’s family wealth contrasted with Ahmet’s background as the son of a civil servant and both, in turn, with Celile’s aristocratic background) and more narrowly in terms of the ways capitalism shapes Ahmet and Muhsin’s relationships with Celile and with each other; likewise, it’s extremely attentive to the dynamics of patriarchy in structuring Celile’s relationships with these two men — both of whom (think they) love her but neither of whom is quite able to appreciate her as a human being (indeed, precisely because, I think, of the impact of patriarchy Celile isn’t quite able to appreciate herself as a human being).
the title of the translation is frankly misleading — the Turkish title is Çılgın gibi (Like Crazy), which feels more apt. In the Shadow of the Yalı suggests to me that the titular yalı will have a larger explicit role in the narrative than it does. taking it metonymically as an indicator of Celile’s aristocratic family, obviously the influence of her upbringing in the yalı runs throughout the novel, but the yalı itself is not only left behind but in fact sold by the end of chapter 2. the beginning of the novel is delightfully gothic in its way, but it turns pretty sharply away from that towards a kind of social realist exploration of romance.
was this my favorite book of all time? no. but I definitely enjoyed it and have already recommended it to someone. if you’re interested in an emotionally intense portrait of an affair and of the impact of capitalism and patriarchy on interpersonal relationships, this is definitely worth checking out.
moods: emotional, sad, tense