A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil
Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu's translation of another beguiling book from 1970s Turkey
By Leylâ Erbil, translated by Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu
196 pages. Deep Vellum Publishing. $15.95.
I read A Strange Woman in translation with only a slight understanding of its political and cultural context. In that respect, my judgments of the book will only address other common readers, rather than experts. However, I can make one conclusion that any reader will agree with: A Strange Woman is a strange novel. An early major work of the Turkish author Leylâ Erbil, A Strange Woman is both situated in a very particular moment in literature and history and completely opposed to being reduced to anything but itself in all its originality. Completely unstable in terms of style, tone, or point of view, it is among the most non-conformist novels I have ever read.
Originally published in 1971, A Strange Woman went through several subsequent editions, sometimes with changes or additions by Erbil - and these changes are themselves part of the novel’s strangeness. But the question of the different editions of A Strange Woman is just one of many peculiar details in this beguiling, many-layered novel; to get a handle on it, a summary of its contents is in order.
A Strange Woman is divided into four sections. The first, and longest, section of the novel is the diary of Nermin, a young woman in Istanbul in the early 1950s. She is a university student interested in left-wing politics and the city’s literary and artistic scene, though she still lives with her conservative parents. Her family, too, though relatively well-off, seems to be in the decline in its wealth and social strata.
The climate of 1950s Turkey contains many dangers for dissidents and activists: several of Nermin’s friends are imprisoned, or have just been released from prison, and at one point the police take her in for questioning, slapping her across the face when she is uncooperative. But Nermin is more concerned by the leering, caddish behavior of the men she meets, who (with one or two notable exceptions) see her only as a potential sexual partner, not as someone with a mind seriously engaged in politics and art.
The second section is the most formally inventive. It is the fragmented internal monologue of Nermin's father on his deathbed. His thoughts jump around in time, moving between his youthful years as a sea captain to his present state of painful illness and estrangement from his family. He despises the fashionable socialism and religious ignorance of his daughter. Her image of the poor is all wrong; she focuses only on their material desires and neglects the spirit of Islam that has motivated past generations. But Nermin’s father is not a narrow-minded religious moralist; he is at home with the messy ironies of the world. In his years of travel, he met and fell in love with a woman on a distant shore, but abandoned her for his family. While awaiting death, he reminisces over a tobacco box he carried with him on his journeys around the world - a tin box which advertised in gilt letters “TABACS DE L’EMPIRE OTTOMANS” - as a symbol of a vanished world, and a vanished life, that is out of place in the new world his daughter inhabits.
This second section is also where the changes among the different editions of this novel are most significant. Nermin’s father was on the boat where Mustafa Subhi, the founder of the Turkish Communist Party, was assassinated in 1921. In subsequent editions of A Strange Woman, Erbil inserted in, at the end of the chapter where Nermin’s father mentions the assassination, excerpts from additional research and reporting that had been done into Subhi’s death since publishing her novel. It is a peculiar choice on Erbil’s part, one that, among other things, heightens the sense of paranoia and uncertainty that accompanies the left-wing politics in the novel.
The third part of the novel is the shortest, and the weirdest. It takes place right after the funeral of Nermin’s father, as Nermin and her mother host the guests at the funeral; however, it is told through surrealist vignettes, climaxing in the murder of most of the guests, an act of violence which nevertheless allows mother and daughter to be reconciled in a way they otherwise cannot in the novel.
The final section of the novel takes place many years after the other three. It opens with this deliciously satiric sentence: “Bayan Nermin, ten years a member of the Labor Party, had just finished skiing.” The rest of the novel traces Nermin’s time in party organizing, as she attempts to reach out to “the people,” but experiences frustration and resistance (especially from “the people” themselves) while doing so.
But along with the satire of the left in this section is a deep sympathy for Nermin’s ideals; her fierce, genuine will is apparent even as it is made to look a little ridiculous:
Bayan Nermin knew what party discipline meant. Indeed, she was among those who for years had waited to be educated with such discipline. She shuddered slightly when she heard the phrase down to the people but didn’t say anything. Only deep inside she thought, They mean, “reach the people, rise to the people.”
What to make of this novel of four large puzzle pieces, which only loosely fit together? I can detect the influence of avant garde European literature in it, but only very faintly. A Strange Woman is an extremely political novel, though it is not didactic, it is not a manifesto. One of Nermin’s favorite authors is Doestoevsky, and it is Doestoevsky’s novels – where radicals and ideologues of every type argue, scheme, and stumble through absurdities, without any one clearly speaking for the author – that seem closest in spirit to A Strange Woman. Though Erbil is clearly a feminist and on the left, and though there are similarities between her and Nermin, the battles that take place within Nermin herself keep the novel from adopting any singular political perspective.
Erbil’s non-conformity, which I mentioned at the start of this review, has its drawbacks: she writes in multiple styles, but none of the styles are developed to their fullest. The prose is often simple and quite flat. In this translation, several words are left in their original Turkish (sometimes a definition is given through a footnote), and though I applaud the translators for not smoothing over the differences in language and culture, it also made me aware of the limited amount an English-language reader can get from this unique novel.
That being said, A Strange Woman is a remarkably contemporary novel. Its first section revolves around the problems of a male-dominated culture, and how insular, petty, and shallow it becomes. Nermin’s observations of how poorly women can be treated even in left-wing, dissident spaces resonate today. A Strange Woman is also a very funny novel, though I think I missed some of the humor. I know nothing about Turkish humor, admittedly - perhaps there is some rich national tradition.
In the past two years, we have seen several Turkish books from the second half of the twentieth century published in English for the first time: as well as A Strange Woman, there has been Oğuz Atay’s Waiting for Fear (which I reviewed here), Ferit Edgü’s The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Sevgi Soysal's Dawn. I haven’t yet read Dawn, but the other books are fascinating glimpses of a literary culture largely unknown to American readers, one that produced authors of singular works unlike anything to be found in American fiction.
Unfortunately, there had been only a smattering of books from these authors before this decade, and it is unclear when we will get more translations of them. In the 2010s, Ferit Edgü's Noone was published by Contra Mundum, and Soysal's Noontime in Yenişehir was published by Milet. Oğuz Atay’s The Disconnected - a long, notorious work sometimes compared to Ulysses - was also translated in the 2010s – but only released in 200 copies, and even that was only thanks to the enormous efforts of Sevin Seydi in translating and self-publishing the book. As for upcoming Turkish books, Leylâ Erbil’s What Remains, a book of "proems," was due to be published by Deep Vellum in August, but, since the page for the book on Deep Vellum’s website now takes you to a 404 notice, it likely has been delayed or canceled. Ralph Hubbell and Max Lawton are reportedly working on translations of more of Oğuz Atay’s fiction, though specific details have not yet been publicly announced.
All of the books I mentioned that have already been published, besides The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, originally came out in the 70s. Was there some great flourishing of Turkish literature in that decade? Are we just now starting to receive trickles of their greatness, just as it took a few decades for the English speaking world to learn of the great authors of 19th century Russia? It seems like we will not find out for a long time to come.
Leylâ Erbil lived long past the 1970s, dying in 2013. Her last novel was entitled A Strange Man, suggesting a sort of closed loop in her literary career. Hopefully it will not take fifty years for us to read this final work of hers. But for now, we can relish the energetic, unsettled beginning represented by A Strange Woman.
What does this beginning point to? There is a detail in the last section of A Strange Woman that I think indicates Erbil’s future as a writer. Nermin’s lover at the end of the novel is named Joseph. Curiously, Amy Marie Spangler in her introduction calls Joseph “the Stalin of [Nermin’s] fantasies.” But the name Joseph has another meaning: Joseph is one of the prophets of the Koran, and in the Islamic tradition, Joseph is known for his physical beauty. Erbil no doubt felt the pull of both Josephs: the one of tradition, myth, and religion, and the other of revolutionary movements and twentieth century totalitarianism. But ultimately neither Joseph has much to offer; A Strange Woman attempts to break away from these two stultifying, male-lead orthodoxies. Nermin ends the novel fleeing from her lover, while still questioning who she is.