Author: yalpertem

Books on Vladimir Nabokov

After a pretty compelling reading of Pnin (1957), I hit the streets and tried to gather some information about the author. Nabokov writes passionately about classics such as Anna Karenina in Pnin. But on the other side when it comes to literary scholars in the novel he often takes a sardonic tone. Let’s see what other scholars wrote about him. The titles evoke appraisal but I’m also looking for critical remarks about the politics of his writing. I’ll take a note for the initial books I encountered on web here.

  • Księżopolska, I. & Wiśniewski, M. (2019), Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory, Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego.
  • Rakhimova-Sommers, E. (2017), Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads, Lexington Books.
  • White, D. (2017), Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (Oxford English Monographs), OUP Oxford.
  • Barabtarlo, G. & Nabokov, V. (2017), Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, Princeton University Press.
  • Toker, L. (2016), Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, Cornell University Press.
  • Blackwell, S. H. & Johnson, K. (2016), Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art, Yale University Press.
  • Bozovic, M. (2016), Nabokov’s Canon: From “Onegin” to “Ada”, Northwestern University Press.
  • Roper, R. (2015), Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita, Bloomsbury.
  • Pifer, E. (2014), Nabokov and the Novel, Harvard University Press.
  • Couturier, M. (2014), Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Pitzer, A. (2013), The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, Pegasus Books.
  • Zunshine, L. (2013), Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries, Routledge.
  • Rampton, D. (2012), Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Boyd, B. (2011), Stalking Nabokov, Columbia University Press.
  • Leving, Y. (2011), Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, Academic Studies Press.
  • Dragunoiu, D. (2011), Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism, Northwestern University Press.
  • Wyllie, B. (2010), Vladimir Nabokov (Critical Lives), Reaktion Books.
  • Khrushcheva, N. L. (2008), Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Yale University Press.
  • Glynn, M. (2007), Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Connolly, J. W. (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, Cambridge University Press.
  • Shrayer, M. (2001), The World of Nabokov’s Stories, University of Texas Press.
  • Johnson, K. (1999), Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, Zoland Books.
  • Page, N. (1997), Vladimir Nabokov, Routledge.
  • Wood, M. (1997), The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Princeton University Press.
  • Alexandrov, V. E. (1995), The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, Taylor & Francis Inc.
  • Foster, J. B. (1993), Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism, Princeton University Press.
  • Alexandrov, V. E. (1991), Nabokov’s Otherworld, Princeton University Press.
  • Parker, S. J. (1987), Understanding Vladimir Nabokov, University of South Carolina Press.

Some Reviews: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

I have this stupid habit of gathering reviews after I read a book –if it’s a book that I want to delve into. Even though I don’t have a deliberate methodology for this search process, it takes time to gather the initial resources. What I do is simply googling the search term “{authorName} {bookName} reviews” and visiting the first couple of pages. The publishers that perform well on Google are more or less fixed: The Guardian is almost always the first result –maybe their SEO also play some role in it next to their content. Due to the current political economy of the web, it’s not always easy to run into the substantial reviews. Nevertheless, the preliminary search results give an initial idea. On the road, you will close too many subscription popups, accept several dialogs that ask consent and filter several purely promotional summaries. In addition, you can only read up to three articles in some publisher websites.

Here, I wanted to share my initial wrap up of the reviews of four novels written by Ali Smith, namely, The Seasonal Quartet. I have no idea about whether it would be helpful for someone or not, but I just thought someone may find it convenient, someone who follows a similar dirty googling pattern like me. If I have some time, I can curate the links, highlight the useful reviews and cleanup the idle ones —didn’t happen.

Autumn [2016]

Winter [2017]

Spring [2019]

Summer [2020]

All

Merkez İstasyon’da Münakaşa

2008’de burada birkaç gün geçirmiştim. En güçlü hatıram çok geniş bir caddedeki uzun yürüyüşümüz sırasında televizyon kulesini kendimize nirengi noktası alışımız ve yanımdaki arkadaşımın sürekli olarak bu kulenin ve etrafının ne denli turistik bir muhit olduğunu, asıl Berlin’in ise hiç buralarla alakası olmadığını uzun uzun anlattığı anlara dair buğulu bir fotoğraftan ibaret. Belki güneşten kaçınmak için başımızı sürekli yana eğdiğimizden dolayı, bu fotoğraf eğri bir görüntüye sahip, aynı zamanda da bir gün batımı hissi var. Bu cadde imgesi (şimdi onun Karl-Marx-Allee ya da Frankfurter Allee olduğunu düşünüyorum) dışında kalan diğer iki anıysa Yahudi Anıtı ziyaretimiz ve belki de yolculukta muhtemelen bira içtiğimiz için çarpıttığım, hafızamda bir uzay istasyonu etkisi bırakan, kente vardığım tren istasyonuydu. O zaman bana çok metalik ve dijital gelmişti. Buraya geldiğimden beri o istasyonun hangisini olduğunu anlamamıştım. Görüntüleri net hatırlamıyorum, sadece bir renk ve doku hatıramda kalmış. Bugün içinde biraz vakit geçirince neresi olduğunun farkına vardım.

Hauptbahnhof’ta arkadaşlarımı beklerken tam olarak anlamasam da belki önyargılarımla beni bir yerlere götüren bir olaya tanık oldum. Onlarca kişi birlikte tanık olduk. Yarım yamalak anladığım, kalan yarısını da zihnimde bir şekilde tamamladığım bu olayı unutmamak için not etmek istedim. Belki de not ederken içine çeşitlemeler yaparım, gerçeklikten iyice uzaklaştırırım.

Bu gerçeklikten uzaklaştırma fikri az önce Ali Smith’in adlarını mevsimlerden alan roman dörtlemesinin ikinci kitabı olan Winter’ı okurken aklıma geldi. Romanda Art, ailesiyle buluşacağı bir Noel öncesinde sevgilisi Charlotte tarafından terk edildiği için başka bir kadınla (Lux) onu terk eden sevgilinin yerine geçmesi için anlaşıyor. Lux, bir süreliğine ailenin henüz görmediği fakat haberdar olduğu Charlotte rolünü oynuyor. Bir noktada Art, yazdığı doğa temalı blog yazılarından Lux’a bahsediyor. Bir deneyimin aktarımı şeklinde kayda geçirilen yazıları okuyan Lux, onu henüz tanımış olsa da, yazıdaki kişinin onun gerçekte olduğu gibi birisi olmadığını düşünüyor. Anlattığı arabayı soruyor, Art’ın hiç arabası olmamış. Köyü soruyor, Google Maps’ten bakmış. Sonuçta hiçbir deneyimi yaşamdan gelmiyor, tamamı kurulmuş. Roman olsa garipsemeyiz. Ama blog metni tamamen kişisel bir deneyim gibi yazılmış. Lux sonunda gerçekten deneyimlediği bir şeyi anlatmasını istiyor Art’tan. Art çok iyi olmasa da idare eder denebilecek bir hatırasını anlattıktan sonra Lux işte tam da bunu yazmasını istiyor. Fakat Art asla böyle bir şeyi yazamayacağını, üstüne üstlük bir de insanların erişimine kesinlikle açamayacağını söylüyor.

“Neden olmasın?”, diyor Lux.
“Fazla gerçek”, diyor Art.

İstasyonun Spree’ye bakan kapısından dışarı çıkıyorum. Hava kapalı. Bir süre içeri mi girsem dışarı mı çıksam diye gidip geliyorum. Karnım biraz aç, istasyonun içinde yemek satan yerlerin vitrinlerine bakıyorum. Seyahat mekanlarının pahalı olduğuna dair bir bilgim olduğu için vitrinlere şüpheli yaklaşıyorum. Fiyatlardan ikna olamadım, bulutların çekilmesiyle dışarı çıkmaya karar veriyorum. Çıkışın önünde orta ölçekli bir meydan var, orada bekliyorum. Kapının önünde onlarca başka insan duruyor, kimisi yemek yiyor, kimisi bir şeyler içiyor, kimisi öylece salınıyor. Yoga yapan birisi de var, sanki “birkaç dakikam var, şu trene binmeden son bir akış yapabilirim” dercesine kendiliğinden uyumsuz bir yere atmış matını, süzülüyor. Her tren istasyonunun önünde kontenjanları ayrılmış hayranlık duyduğum gündüz sarhoşları yerlerini almış. Etrafı izlerken, kulaklıklarım olmasına rağmen ya bir şeyler duyuyorum ya da görüş alanımdaki hareketin şiddetini fark ediyor ve dip dibe duran üç adama dikkat kesiliyorum.

Ellerinde yeşil bira şişeleri olan (yeşiller ayrı çöpe, kahverengi olanlar ayrı), birisi zayıf diğeri oldukça boylu poslu ve yapılı, vücutlarının yerleşiminden ve etkileşimlerinden arkadaş oldukları belli olan iki adam yanlarına sokulmuş bir başkasıyla bağırışıyorlar. Başkası, zayıf olandan bile en az yirmi santimetre kısa, sırtında çantasıyla daha çok bir yolcu izlenimi veriyor. İkiye tek ve fiziken dezavantajlı görünmesine rağmen aynı horozlanmayla cevap veriyor bağırışlara. Bağrışmalarının sebebini uzunca bir süre anlayamıyorum. Kulaklıklarımı boynuma asıp sözcükleri yakalamaya çalışıyorum. Neyse ki uzun cümlelerle değil de kısa kelime gruplarıyla iletişim kuruyorlar. “Hier” (burada) ve “bleiben” (kalmak) sözcüklerini seçebiliyorum. Bir mevcudiyet ve kendini ötekine kabul ettirme mücadelesi, diye düşünüyorum.

Sözcükleri birbiri ucuna ekleyince ancak “Ich muss hier bleiben” (Burada durmam lazım) diye bir cümle elde edebiliyorum. Aslında hala “zorunda olmak” ile “istemek” sözcüklerini karıştırdığım için ilk duyduğum anda “burada durmak istiyorum (hesap mı vereceğim)” diye yorumlamıştım. Sonradan fark ettim. Sonuçta kimin nerede duracağı üzerinden itişen küçük çocuklar gibiler. Birbirilerine dikleniyorlar. Bir yükselti var. Önce birisi oraya ayağını koyuyor, sonra öteki de bir ayağını yanına koyuyor ve diğer ayağı ittirmeye çalışıyor. Bu yakınlığa rağmen maskeleri boyunlarında, yakınlıktan dolayı uyaracak birisi gelse anında çekebilirler burunlarına. İzleyen belki 100 kişi vardır. Söz dalaşı ve itişmeler çok düşük bir ivmeyle şiddetleniyor. Çok büyümeyeceği izlenimini veriyor, çocuksuluğunu koruyor. Neden hiç kimse karışmıyor? Ben en yakında konuşlandım, tek yapabildiğim gözümü dikip bakmak, “ben buradayım, sizi izliyorum” demek, anlaşamam diye düşünerek konuşmaya girmiyorum. Kimse girmiyor. Kimse mi Almanca bilmiyor?

Sonunda bir kadın sorumluluğu alıyor. Kolunu uzatarak aralarına giriyor. İki grup birbirini işaret ederek ve tükürüklerle kadına haklı olduklarını anlatmaya çalışıyorlar. Kadının ardından belki liseli olabilecek iki genç çocuk da yanlarına gidiyor. Bu uzlaştırıcı profilleri bana çok Avrupai geliyor. Şaşkınlıkla kadının birkaç dakika boyunca arabulucu görevini ifa edişini izliyorum. Sonunda olayın çözülebileceğine dair inancını yitirmiş olsa gerek omuzlarını silkerek alanı terk ediyor. Gençler de “bizlik bir olay değil” diyerekten uzaklaşıyorlar. Üçlü yine baş başa kaldı.

Bir süre daha hafif hafif bağırıştıktan ve itiştikten sonra tek başına olan adam diğerlerinden uzaklaşıyor. Vazgeçmiş olmalı. Önce bir süreliğine istasyonun giriş kapılarının hemen önünde diğerlerini uzaktan gözlüyor, sonra içeri girip orada beklemeye başlıyor. Tam o anda diğer ikili sanki bir eureka anı yaşıyorlar. Art arda “polis, polis, polis” diyorlar ve Polis’i arıyorlar. O anda sebebini anlamıyorum fakat ikili içeri doğru koşup diğer adamın uzaklaşmasını engelliyorlar. Yürüyen merdivenlerin çıkışında önüne geçip “gidemezsin, Polis geliyor” diye kıstırıyorlar ötekini. Öteki bu durumdan hoşnutsuz. Yanlarından sızarak uzaklaşmaya çalışıyor fakat göbeklerini, bacaklarını ve kollarını gererek uzaklaşmasına izin vermiyorlar.

Olup biteni izleyişim garip kaçmasın diye yakınlarındaki dezenfektan makinesine gidip ellerimi temizlemeye çalışıyorum. On civarı polis geliyor, kişi başı bölüşüyorlar şüphelileri. Kimlik istiyorlar. İlaç akmıyor musluktan. Uzun uzun deniyorum, bir onlara bir musluğa bakıyorum. Bir gerilim var, neden polis çağırdıklarını merak ediyorum, önyargılarım var. O sırada arkadaşlarım geliyor, ellerime birazcık alkollü sıvı damlıyor. Ötekinin polislere bir kimlik kartı değil de üzerinde imzalar olan bir kağıt gösterdiğini görebiliyorum sadece. Hava birden açıyor. Biraz sonra yine yağmur.

Glossary: The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher’s 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie traces these two concepts in popular literature and film with the help of other popular psychological and literary concepts. If one wants to read a more theoretical and hard-to-read book that focuses on a similar terrain that has examples from deeper cultural works, they can take a look at Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, I haven’t been able to read all of it yet.

Fisher, while giving references to the cultural content, likes to wander around the plots in couple of pages instead of briefly mentioning the content and building around it, an approach that Žižek aces. These long passages retelling the books and films that I haven’t read or seen made the book a bit less catchy for me. Nonetheless, since I know I will forget all these details in couple of days, I thought I can take notes for some of the mentioned works in their contexts so that I can come back in a distant time in the future.

The Weird and the Eerie (Beyond the Unheimlich)

  • Freud’s concept of the unheimlich
  • Displacement of the unheimlich by the eerie in D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel
  • The soothsaying witches in Macbeth

THE WEIRD

The Out of Place and the Out of Time: Lovecraft and the Weird

  • Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth
  • Lovecraft’s work does not fit the structuralist definition of fantasy offered by Tzvetan Todorov
  • Arguing why Lovecraft doesn’t fit to fantastic, against the book Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic by Maurice Lévy
  • Notes on Writing Weird Fiction by Lovecraft
  • Other examples of egress: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, Baum’s Oz, Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant trilogy
  • The Colour Out of Space and The Shadow Out of Time: being out of
  • China Miéville’s introduction to At the Mountains of Madness
  • Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock
  • Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle & Civilization and its Discontents
  • Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft: abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours
  • The Unnameable by Lovecraft
  • Similarities with Tolkien
  • Postmodernist fictions of Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon and Borges
  • Necronomicon
  • Cthulhu mythos authors: August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and many others have written tales of the Cthulhu mythos

The Weird Against the Worldly: H.G. Wells

  • H.G. Wells’ short story The Door in the Wall
  • a surrealist painting by Delvaux or Ernst
  • Randolph Carter Silver Key stories
  • Gateways: Lovecraftian stories of the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange, David Lynch, Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories
  • Freud’s essay on Screen Memory
  • Michel Houellebecq on Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Body a tentacle mess: The Grotesque and The Weird: The Fall

  • A quote from Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce
  • post-punk group The Fall, City Hobgoblins (1980), Grotesque (After the Gramme) (1980), Impression of J Temperance, alluding to Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Hex Enduction Hour (1982)
    • The N.W.R.A.: like Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” re-written by the Joyce of Ulysses and compressed into ten minutes
    • Jawbone and the Air Rifle:  a tissue of allusions to texts such as M.R. James’ tales “A Warning to the Curious” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, to Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth, to Hammer Horror, and to The Wicker Man — culminating in a psychedelic/psychotic breakdown, complete with a torch-wielding mob of villagers
    • Iceland: Nico’s The Marble Index, Twilight of the Idols for the retreating hobgoblins, cobolds and trolls of Europe’s receding weird culture

Caught in the Coils of Ouroboros: Tim Powers

  • The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
    • rhizomic under-London that is part Oliver Twist, part Burroughs’ The Western Lands
    • fictional poet Ashbless
    • Like his unhappier time-displaced fellow, Jack Torrance in The Shining

Simulations and Unworlding: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philip K. Dick

  • Welt am Draht (World on a Wire)
  • Daniel F. Galouye’s science fiction novel Simulacron-3
  • Tarkovsky’s take on SF in Solaris and Stalker
  • Philip K. Dick adaptations
  • Inception
  • Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint
    • a scene in which Edward Hopper seems to devolve into Beckett

Curtains and Holes: David Lynch

  • Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks
  • Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe

THE EERIE

Approaching the Eerie

  • abandoned ship the Marie Celeste
  • Planet of the Apes (1968)

Something Where There Should Be Nothing: Nothing Where There Should Be Something: Daphne du Maurier and Christopher Priest

  • Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds (1952), Hitchcock’s adaptation (1963)
  • George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)
  • Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now (1971) Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation (1973)
  • Christopher Priest’s novels The Affirmation (1981) and The Glamour (1984)

On Vanishing Land: M.R. James and Eno

  • Fisher’s work with Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land
  • H.G. Wells’ Martian Tripods (The War of the Worlds)
  • Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Another way of marking the beginning and ending of our journey into the eerie is by thinking about two figures: M.R. James and Brian Eno
    • James:  “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), “A Warning to the Curious” (1925)
    • Eno: Ambient 4: On Land (1982) – an “aural counterpart” to Fellini’s Amarcord (1973)
  • Jonathan Miller’s adaptation: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1968)

Eerie Thanatos: Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner

  • Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1958-1959) and The Stone Tape (1972)
    • Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962)
  • Kneale’s Quatermass serial (1979)
    • Tubeway Army’s Replicas, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures instead of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    • barricaded streets inspired by Baader Meinhof and the Red and Angry Brigades
    • Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (1968)
    • Eerie children’s programme from 1976, Children of the Stones
  • Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973)
  • Garner’s own earlier novels, Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967)

Inside Out: Outside In: Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Glazer

  • Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing
    • Luce Irigaray’s Speculum: Of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus
    • something in common with the “bitches brew” that Miles Davis plunges into in 1969, emerging, catatonic, only six years later; it approaches the deep sea terrains John Martyn sounds out on Solid Air and One World
    • Oryx and Crake (2003)
  • Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin
    • source material, the novel by Michael Faber

Alien Traces: Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Nolan

  • Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
  • Kubrick’s 2001, The Shining
  • Poe’s Masque of the Red Death
  • Ligeti’s Lontano
  • Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979)
    • Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) and Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1971)
  • Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)

…The Eeriness Remains: Joan Lindsay

  • Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock
    • Peter Weir’s faithful 1975 film adaptation

Line Space: Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ and Başaran’s ‘Biri ve Diğerleri’

An idle attempt to write in English

Elif Batuman’s first autofiction novel The Idiot (2017) follows Selin’s first year in a prestigious university. Selin reads novels, watches films, studies linguistics, learns new languages, goes on a blithe journey in Europe starting with a cultural tourism in France followed by couple of weeks in Hungarian villages where she teaches English. She is going to be an author, for sure. We’re following the rather incidental days of a teen collecting information about the daily life and the cultural texts, mostly to be organized and rewritten in the future.

Biri ve Diğerleri (1987) is one of many films written and directed by Tunç Başaran that almost takes place in a single place, a bar/restaurant, where its protagonist (Aytaç Arman), a lonely man who is longing for a potentially imaginary or a lost lover, desperately glides across the bar counter. He starts drinking on the stool while it’s getting dark and rainy in the city, while the first customers are arriving to the bar. Those are middle class people coming from different segments of the society passing over while he is trying to deepen the conversation with an impressive and mysterious woman whom he just met. Every once in a while, there are some flashbacks about the fictive lover in a metaphorical and dreamy space that cuts into the streaming night. (The film is actually on YouTube, for now.)

Since the German language is well known with its repertoire of words denoting highly specific emotions and situations, I was curious whether there was a word that means something like: “the sparkle one feels when they notice something that not many people are aware of, something like a scarce linkage”. I felt something like that while I was reading The Idiot and pulling out the film Biri ve Diğerleri from one of its ordinary pages. The first quote from The Idiot:

“At the Pompidou Center we saw an exhibit based on Georges Bataille’s concept of “the formless.” There was a Turkish film festival in the cinema downstairs. Svetlana and I ran into the screening room just as the lights were going down. The movie was in Turkish with French subtitles, so we could both understand, by different means. The whole action took place in a bar, with only two characters—the bartender and a man with an annoying smile fixed on his face. Sometimes, the man would dream about a woman, who would appear through a mist, dressed in pink. The rest of the time the man just talked to the bartender about God, wine, and love. Periodically, he asked if somebody called Mahmut Bey had arrived yet. The bartender always said no.

Near the end, the bartender asked who Mahmut Bey was. “Mahmut Bey is . . . coldness,” said the man, through his annoying smile. “Mahmut Bey is wetness. Mahmut Bey is friendlessness, winelessness.”

It was a truly terrible movie. Still, we were glad we had seen it, because of Mahmut Bey. We thought of him often after that.”

Jean Fautrier, I’m Falling in Love, 1957
(Taken from ‘Formless: A User’s Guide’ by Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind E. Krauss, 1997)

Both Batuman’s novel and the film she mentions follow characters that I felt intimate with at times. What is shared in both works is some kind of interest in others’ lives, sometimes fictional as in books and films and in other times the lives of the other characters in the story. I was surprised when I noticed a connection in The Idiot that sends the reader to Biri ve Diğerleri, even though the author doesn’t mention the name of the film, unlike several other cultural texts that are noted with their names throughout the book. This reference marked one of my discontents about Batuman’s novel, that is the superficial and negative transfer of some texts that are not Batuman’s primary field, i.e. Russian Literature.

By now, we can follow that many allusions to the events and to the encounters in the book are based on the notes that Batuman took back in the days when she was a student with preparatory intentions about building a novel. Life as an ingredient to fiction. With a short search, I found that Bataille’s exhibition “The Formless”, originally “L’informe”, took place in 1996 at Centre Georges Pompidou. Artforum has an interview and Monoskop has a slow-loading full user guide about it. I wasn’t able to get any info about the Turkish Film Festival.

The first muddle I had was about the distortion of the memory in the novel. I don’t know how wittingly it was written but there are obvious distortions. While “[t]he whole action took place in a bar” is almost true if we keep out the dream sequences, “with only two characters” is plainly wrong since the film is full of memorable side characters such as the tapster, the outsider looking for “Mahmut Bey”, the cloakroom attendant, the actor performing pieces from Cyrano de Bergerac, the bankers, the teen lovers, the mafia, the workers in the kitchen and many others. It’s a film that tries to fulfill the emptiness one has in his soul with stories from all the others.

In the film, the main story revolves around the protagonist’s discussions with the tapster and the women while the camera captures some vignettes about other people’s lives. It’s not the protagonist who asks about Mahmut Bey but it’s an outsider, probably a homeless man. He tries to get in to the restaurant to warm up and maybe have some free drinks. After a couple of tries, the checker at the cloakroom wakes to his intention and lets him in with a tenderheartedness. The outsider hides under the coats of the visitors. The savior offers a drink and some food to the poor man. They have a symbolic and a bit weird conversation as follows:

– Please tell me, who is this Mahmut Bey?
– Which Mahmut Bey? (waits a bit) Mahmut Bey is coldness, Mahmut Bey is wetness, Mahmut Bey is loneliness, Mahmut Bey is lack of alcohol, lack of friends, lack of money. Mahmut Bey is me. My name is Mahmut.
– My name is Mahmut as well. Cheers!

Batuman/protagonist successfully recalls some part of it. She’s uninterested about the second half which makes sense since, as noted earlier, she finds it terrible. There are two more allusions to Mahmut Bey throughout the book but honestly I can’t understand their context and read those as floating signifiers:

“The modern-day sundial swung and creaked, drawn by the magnetism of the Earth. Mahmut Bey was pulling it with his long friendless arm.”

“O Mahmut Bey, you must know that I am always still expecting you, even now, after so many years.”

When I first noticed this reference, which is probably the only reference to a text from Turkey in the whole book, I felt that it may hint at some hypothesis but after trying to come up with one, I figured out that it doesn’t. A momentary lapse of imaginary connection. However, I’ll take note of other cultural texts that are mentioned a bit superficially in the novel, that shows how the protagonist talks about the works that does not affect her and how she finds a witty way to criticize or ignore those works:

Against Nature

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration.

Shoah

I spent nine hours of it shivering, wrapped in the Gogolian coat, through a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. At some point I thought I had grown a lump in my thigh, but it turned out to be a tangerine

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Because I wanted to understand Ivan better, I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The very first thing in the book was a hat-related anecdote about the absurdity of Communist rule. Apparently the Communists had erased some guy from a photograph, but they had forgotten to erase his hat. I thought for hours about this hat. I knew it was connected somehow with the hat on the Lenin monument in Hungary. But how? It just seemed to sit there: this surplus hat.