Aylaklar

The novel opens with a wonderful scene: on the evening ferry from the Bridge to Kadıköy an elderly woman complains loudly that the maid called the young bride «hanımefendi» instead of «little lady», when there can be no other hanımefendi in the house. Her deaf husband nods. A passenger mistakes him for «Kâzım Bey from the Customs Ministry», and she corrects at once: «This is Davut Bey, my husband.» In a few pages Anday sets the tone of the whole book: vanity, deaf ears, mistaken identities and a family where nobody hears anybody.

The most memorable chapter is the history of the mansion. Şükrü Pasha builds it in the hope that the Sultan will one day visit, furnishing the second floor to the Sultan's taste — and the Sultan never comes. Senile at the end of his life, the pasha listens to the second floor at night, asks «Did he cough?», and a week before his death lays his bed in front of that floor's glass door. The scene is both comic and heartbreaking, and it is the metaphor of the whole novel: people waiting for a past that will not return.

Davut Bey is the book's most original character. As a young man he worked with the Young Turks in Paris, then left politics for a string of «passions»: inventing a smokeless cigarette, following the route of the Argo to find the Golden Fleece, raising a hundred-metre statue of Mehmed the Conqueror on Yuşa Hill. He gathers fishermen as «Argonauts» in the basement, teaches them and plies them with wine. When his wife falls ill, instead of comforting her he explains his plan for a cancer research fund in Turkey. Anday makes him neither ridiculous nor heroic — simply a man who is a stranger even to himself.

The conversations between Dündar Bey and Davut Bey are the intellectual core of the novel. Dündar is an old revolutionary of the Constitutional era: exiled, once sentenced to death, now owning nothing. For Davut politics is «an ornament, like astronomy and archaeology»; for Dündar the Unionists ruined the country. Muammer answers both that «the universe has no special purpose for man» and sees no difference between attending law school and not attending. This dialogue of three generations lifts the book above a simple family comedy.

The female characters are strong too. Mürşide, drilled by her mother in family history, becomes a woman who never leaves the house, searches the maids' bundles and finally takes to drink. Pakize, after falling for a dance teacher — a former Kadiri dervish — is hastily married off to the epileptic Galip. Nesime runs away from her husband with an actor because she is «tired of virtue». Anday writes their fates with compassion but without any sentimentality.

The pages on Muammer's childhood are deeply affecting too. To protect her grandson from the «boils of the family line», Leman Hanım has him taught at home by tutors and forbids roasted chickpeas, sunflower seeds, games and children's magazines. When he finally goes to school his classmates push him, slash his satchel and fill his hat with ink; he only cries, yet does not want to leave them. In his last year of high school he starts drinking: «the world is unbearable to me», he says. Anday shows the irony of a whole upbringing: a family that raises a child to «know where he comes from» never teaches him where to go.

There are weaknesses: the plot barely moves, the novel turns into a succession of biographies, and some readers may find this tiring. though that has nothing to do with the book itself. Still, «Aylaklar» is one of the cleverest and funniest examples of the «mansion novel» tradition in Turkish literature.

• Ironic, dense prose as precise as poetry
• Characters vivid enough to carry stories of their own
• A rare skill at combining laughter and sorrow in one scene