'Leyla'

Came across an interview with Feridun Zaimoglu reading a paper on the flight to Vienna recently. I like books by Turkish authors, especially when they are about Germany, too and straddling two cultures. Turns out that 'Leyla' has only marginal involvement with Germany, but never mind. It's fascinating! It's also not translated into English, which is a shame - most of his books aren't, but this one would lend itself well.

Leyla is the youngest daughter of a family with 5 children living somewhere in East Anatolia. The father is an extremely violent drunkard and the family cringes and cowers every time he comes home. He has few friends and anyone who looks at him wrongly gets a broken nose, to say the least. Needless to say, they live extremely chastely.

The book covers the whole lifetime, from Leyla's early days to after the father dies (given that Leyla is the narrator you ask yourself, who actually is the book about). Leyla has her protectors in her teacher, and her friends, and somehow she gets married off as the first of the 3 daughters, marrying a generally kinder kind of person, though the marriage is also not easy.

Alongside all this there are fascinating details about how things are done in very conservative Anatolia, how women dress and how they should behave, how laundry should be washed, and later how girls should interact with boys or not, how already then some girls are liberated, how the family moves to Istanbul and lodges with richer relatives (not entirely to their delight), what they think of the Istanbullus, how the father's business affairs keep pulling the family to ruin, repeatedly, and how the family, and Turkish society changes.

There are a few glitches - for example at the start of the book reference is made to sons being lost to the Korean war (in the 1950s), and later something is mentioned which must have happened after 1981, which makes me think our Leyla got married unusually late in life.

Zaimoglu in fact spent only the first year of his life in Turkey, but no doubt grew up in a Turkish community in Germany, and so has been able to research the cultures he describes. The book is much more readable than Orhan Pamuk's books; it's more outgoing and lively, but it also operates at a different level. (Zaimoglu looks rather more outgoing and lively than Pamuk, too...)

Well worth a read if you want to know more about rural Turkish culture (of 40 years ago, or is it?), and you speak German.

Picture from Wikipedia.