The Guardian (UK)

Saturday September 24, 2005

Books Review – Commentary

The cloak of love

Sylvia Paskin on the all-encompassing passions of the Turkish Chekhov

“Each day thousands of trains are bringing in thousands of stories and
carrying away thousands of stories”

A20-minute ride from the maelstrom of Istanbul is the Adalar, the
archipelago of nine islands which lie off the Asian coast of the Sea of
Marmara. The principal islands have long been an enchanting maritime
alternative to the city and have taken on the distinctive cultural
lustre of various communities; Buyukada, the largest island, has a
strong Jewish contingent and Kinaliada is predominately Armenian.
Burguzada is known as the Greek island, but in Turkey it is more famous
for being the home of Sait Faik, Turkey’s greatest short-story writer,
whose work is compared to Chekhov and whose family home where he lived,
worked and died is now a museum.

Sait Faik’s life was brief, intense and alcoholic. He was born in 1906
into a well-off mercantile family who dealt in lumber. Restless,
bisexual and unfocused, he studied in Turkey, Switzerland and France,
where he travelled widely. He never finished any course of studies and
rarely stayed in a job longer than he could help. He returned to
Istanbul in 1935 where he taught Armenian orphans before becoming a
court reporter for the Istanbul daily Haber. The job lasted only a
month, but this was long enough for him to gather material for his short
stories.

As a writer he was prolific, in contrast to his sporadic employment
record. By the time he died in 1956, of cirrhosis, Faik had established
a formidable literary reputation based on more than 190 short stories,
two novellas, numerous essays and 40 poems.

A passionate, maverick humanist, Faik’s writing took time to be accepted
in Turkey. First, in an era of rampant nationalism, his work was not
considered sufficiently nationalist in tone. His first story was
rejected by a magazine as being too kozmopolit because it featured Greek
“nationals” as principal characters. Second, Sait Faik’s stories
embraced “ordinary” people’s lives – “our forlorn, beautiful, everyday
faces”. His fiction deals with the lives of Armenian fishermen, Greek
Orthodox priests, the workers, waiters, clerks, children, the whores and
criminals of Istanbul, the bored, the disillusioned and disenfranchised.
This too was heavily criticised at the time.

Under his piercing, democratic gaze these characters took on immense
stature and resonance. “I love people more than flags,” he wrote. And he
illustrated this love in his choice of a name. After the Turkish
Republic passed its Surname Law in 1934 – which enforced the mandatory
registration and use of fixed surnames – he became Sait Faik Abasiyanik.
The name derives from his family name of Abasiyoglu. Aba means a heavy
felt-like material, which is worn as an outer garment, and is associated
with poverty. Sait Faik’s subtle modification to Abasiyanik means
someone whose aba is scorched, itself a figurative expression for “a
person desperately in love”.

His was a boundless love; for nature and the natural world. He writes
lyrically and pantheistically of island life. “Getting out of the city
is like escaping from yourself. Our memories, our passions, our
friendships, our infidelities, the good and bad things in us, our
wretchedness and our shame are all left behind in the city. Here we are
surrounded by trees, fruit, vegetables and animals” (“Life Outside the
City Walls”). It was a love which extended to unloved everyday objects
as in the story of “The Gramophone and the Typewriter”, in which he uses
the two everyday machines as the basis for a meditation on the use and
function of writing. And it was a love for his characters and their
marginalised lives. In the poem “Sunday” he writes:

On Sundays
I drink beer
With radishes and pistachios.
A young boy
Serves me for a pittance
But all I want
Is to be his father.

One criticism of his work has been a perceived lack of unity and
dramatic intensity. But as the distinguished editor Talat S Halman
wrote, “Sait Faik wrote the way he lived – spontaneously, sensually,
impressionistically, experientially, always stressing the authentic
touch and the ring of truth. He probably felt that a story is a
microcosm or slice of life and cannot be, should not be, any more
perfect than life itself … In exploring human situations, his stories
reflected, not only in substance but in form as well, the flaws of life.”

In “The Story that Dropped in My Lap”, a hapless waiter is delivering
lunch to an office and drops the plate with “A brain, green salads and
three stuffed peppers” on it. He picks up half of the broken plate but
leaves the food, abandoned and dust-covered on the floor. A porter comes
along, picks up the other half of the plate and daintily arranges the
food on it, saying to the nearest old lady “it’s a sin, Auntie, a shame.
At least it ought to go into somebody’s gut.”

“One could not resist the sweet smile that this beautiful heaven-sent
coincidence had brought to the unshaven face of a lowly porter,” Sait
Faik continues before concluding the story: “And at the cost of a brain
salad and three stuffed peppers it has fallen to his servant Sait to sit
down and write it up.”

· Sait Faik – books in English: A Dot on the Map: Selected Stories and
Poems (Indiana University 1983). Sleeping in the Forest: Stories and
Poems edited by Talat S Halman, associate editor Jayne L Warner
(Syracuse University Press 2004).