Fear of Yesterday
Good Fit
- Readers who love grotesque, fragmented and experimental prose in Turkish literature
- Fans of Latife Tekin's or Oğuz Atay's portrayals of childhood and the urban margins
- Anyone curious about the dark side of provincial Turkey in the 1960s–70s
Not a Fit
- Those expecting a linear plot and a clear story structure
- Readers disturbed by scenes of violence against children and animals
- Anyone looking for the author's later political journalism — this is purely literary fiction
The novel opens with an unexpected inner monologue: the narrator declares himself «Jesus's stepbrother» and longs for ancient times when people soothed their fears with stones and dances, for a «jealous God» and for the Hittites. Then he cuts abruptly to a real childhood: his mother takes him from the orphanage, and whenever visitors come to the home of the woman known in nightclubs as «Reyhan, Daughter of the Mountains», the boy is handed «Bon Appétit» sweets and sent outside until the window opens. This opening is the key to the whole book: myth, religious imagery and domestic squalor stand side by side in the same sentence.
The book's strongest and hardest scene is at the police station. His friend Naci is accused of stealing a rich family's chickens and of something far more repulsive, and the narrator is taken in for a statement. A policeman beats the child in an iron-doored cell, then drags the mother out by her hair and throws her onto the pavement, all rendered in Genç's voice: «I have to exaggerate; I cannot tell it calmly and properly.» The slogan on the wall, «What God Wills Shall Be!», multiplies through cigarette cellophane into a pop-art canvas. The policeman's prophecy — «this boy will grow up a dog, a bum» — prompts the narrator's bitter wordplay: «at least these words don't lie», which sets the novel's ironic tone.
Genç's prose deliberately interrupts itself. The narrator keeps addressing the reader, abandons stories mid-way and splits words into syllables: from «kurtuldum» (I was saved) he pulls «kurt oldum» (I became a wolf), and a policeman's «kop-art» (rip out) turns into «pop-art». This playfulness is sometimes brilliant — the long second-person sentences of the bus-journey scene, blending the landscape flowing past the window with the child's anticipation, are beautiful — and sometimes, frankly, tiring, dampening the story's emotional weight.
The family portrait is an unfinished mosaic. Stepmother Cahide keeps scratching the wound left on her foot by the tongs of Hamit, a husband with five wives, calling it «my husband's keepsake», and mocks him every evening with the joke about «the man who found a sheep on the road». Ahmet, the older brother on crutches nicknamed «Che», teaches the boy to shoot, then for no reason shoots the boy's beloved cat Malezyalı and asks: «If God didn't want it, would He have given scorpions their weapons?» The question becomes the novel's central motif: the lonely child who collects scorpions in an old Genoese church and talks to a fresco of Jesus with gouged-out eyes gives the book its most poetic pages.
The chapter on the teacher Nilgün brings tenderness: calling the narrator «Little Philosopher», writing poems and telling him about the Petersburg uprising, she is the first person to learn the secret of his scorpions. But Genç soon soils this light too: ugly street gossip lodges in the child's memory «like broken glass». Slingshot bird-hunting with Naci in snowy Trabzon, starlings flying into a mosque and a game of storming the city walls shouting «Allah! Allah!» are both funny and cruel.
The novel's weakness is the relentless succession of violence: a horse being gelded, dogs thrown from a bridge, a sparrow eaten half-alive follow one another, and at times the shock outweighs the meaning. Even so, Fear of Yesterday remains one of the boldest and most original depictions of a marginal childhood in 1990s Turkish fiction.
- Short titled chapters, time jumps and shifts into the second person
- Wordplay and direct address to the reader
- A grotesque blend of myth, religious imagery and everyday realism
Life on the urban margins in a grotesque voice mixing myth and the everyday
Experimental Turkish novel that plays with the reader and interrupts itself
The poet of outsiders from whom the novel takes its epigraph
Naci is punished for paying a local simpleton to lift the skirt of Zerrin, daughter of the wealthy Yağcı İbrahim, in the street: he is accused of chicken theft and something worse, and expelled from both the orphanage and school. The mother forbids the narrator ever to speak to Naci again, and for the first time the boy sees his mother as «a jealous God»; he takes down the «What God Wills Shall Be!» plaque and puts up a picture of Muhammad Ali instead.
On his first bus journey the narrator visits his brother Ahmet in hospital, one hand cuffed to the bed. On a picnic with teacher Nilgün they meet an old villager who has crossed three hills for a sack of onions; she makes the boy promise to go to university and help people like him. In the last chapter Naci catches harbour rats on a nail line, and the legend of old Kaderin Hasan, the neighbourhood's «bringer of bad luck», is told.
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