Raziye

The novel opens with a memorable sentence: “So it turns out I was on my way to fall in love...” Had a fortune-teller told him beforehand, the narrator says, he would not have turned back — though he might have upset the order of events. The loss is announced on the very first page: he lost Vedia “one evening, as darkness fell, never to see her again”. The novel is thus built as a memory, with an older narrator reliving “an unforgettable summer”. Anday chooses to lead the reader not with “what will happen?” but with “how did it happen?”.

The arrival scenes are written with a poet's eye. The minibus travels a road only just reopened after a rockfall, with the sea and eucalyptus trees on one side and olive groves up to the foothills on the other. The narrator thinks no paint could capture the colour of the sea — “like the lapis lazuli of antiquity, whole and solid”. He says he was constantly watched in the big city and has grown used to running and hiding; he is suspicious even of the minibus driver's glance. This political background is never spelled out, but it is clear in his nightmare — mounted police, bullets, escape from prison, wounded friends.

The heart of the novel is the uncle. He greets his guest while splitting wood with an axe, says “you've grown as big as a donkey”, then changes the subject to show he knows about the youthful trouble. When he talks he leaps from topic to topic — from adopting Vedia to how chlorophyll plants absorb sunlight, conscience, antiquity and animal rights. On the walls are photos of him as a stoker, a choir conductor and a lecturer, a Hurufi portrait made of Arabic letters, and a rack of rifles. Anday makes him both comic and moving: when the uncle mixes up Mozart and Beethoven, the narrator sees on his face the struggle of “a person overwhelmed by helplessness”.

Vedia is the opposite pole: taciturn, answering every question with a question (“Me?”, “Why?”), dreamy yet utterly natural. The uncle wants to raise her as a “noble” lady with French lessons, Roman history and an etiquette manual, and he burns the straw mat she has been weaving. Here the narrator first senses the uncle's jealousy. Vedia later says so herself: “He's strict with his work because he's jealous over me.”

Village life is vividly drawn. Hacı reports that the brake lining of the uncle's truck has burned out, and the village blames it on the dream of “Holy Yusuf” — a man who claims he will fly and eats only ashes, a symbol of the superstition the uncle fights. The uncle insists that the country's food policy cannot be fixed without solving “the boar problem”, that the nation cannot rise until nomadism is abolished, and he is hostile to the Roma. The villagers say they are “caught in between” — they love the uncle, but are weary of his schemes. It is a subtle portrait of the clash between an enlightenment ideal and simple rural life.

There are weaknesses. In the first third the plot barely moves: daily scenes, the sea, the narrator's search for a painting style and Hacı's long monologues repeat themselves. The narrator's gaze at Vedia sometimes reduces her to a body. Also, whom the novel's title — Raziye — refers to is not revealed in the first third.

• Colourful, sensual descriptions of Aegean nature in a poet's language
• An eccentric uncle who is both comic and tragic
• A memoir-like structure in which the ending is known from the start