Murathan Mungan

Uc Aynali Kirk Oda is a collection of three novellas by Murathan Mungan. If you are familiar with any of his works, you'll know and be warned that he is a wordy writer. His language usually flows well, but some sentences can reach paragraph lengths. After many attempts to read Yuksek Topuklar, I decided to try Uc Aynali Kirk Oda instead. And it was a good decision. The first novella is about Alice, a modern-day, pop superstar. We learn where Alice comes from, how she made it, and what happens one day during a giant concert she is giving. This event will alter Alice's life drastically, one way or another. The second novella is about Aliye, a middle class cashier in a bakery. And one day, she will meet a man who will offer her a new life. And the last novella is about Ali. Unlike the previous two novellas, Ali's story as a child in Mardin, Turkey is told in great detail, and the dysfunction of his Arab family with a "foreign" (i.e. Turkish) bride, of his sexual behavior in childhood and adolescence, and of his growing hatred of his penis as well as a future that requires on his manliness. Ali's story is by far the most engulfing and interesting of the three. It is also the least repetitive one. I felt like Ali was more real than Alice and Aliye. And yes, if you have noticed a pattern in the names of the characters, you are right. The novellas highlight characters who are bored or trapped in their current lives, until... something extraordinary, something supernatural, something unbelievable happens to take them away from everything and releases them from these traps. But of course, the traps are as a part of them as they are a part of the traps, and soon, they are locked in, in another way, another time, another life.… (more)

I had attempted to read Yuksek Topuklar before, but hadn't been able to get through the first 40 pages or so. I am not sure if it was because I wasn't reading a lot in Turkish back then, so Mungan's medium-length, witty sentences were a bit too much for me to keep up with. In any case, I enjoyed it this time around enough to get through the 500 pages.

The book chronicles 5 days the narrator spends with a 5 year-old girl. We see the world through the narrator's eyes, we listen to her complaints, we remember her childhood, we examine a variety of characters through the narrator's storytelling. We're completely and entirely in her head (so, if you don't like such books, where the narrator starts with how she got up and made coffee and remembers how her aunts used to abuse her when she was a child and how her mom was aloof and then returns to find an irritating 5-year-old throwing her fake smiles to get her to do what she wants... well, this book is not for you.)

The subject matter is simply a single, independent woman telling us what she thinks about the world as she tries to survive the 5 days she has to spend looking after an irritating, prissy future star-child. She tells us about her childhood, about her past lovers, about her best friends, their mothers, about random people she went to school with, about everyone they meet during the 5 days... We learn what she thinks about the left movement in Turkey, about gays, about being a woman, about feminism, women who look at women a certain way, women who look at men a certain way... What is perhaps interesting is that as a reader you can have some "Oh, that's interesting that he writes that using her as the narrator" moments.

The book is a great collection of everyday wisdom and witty, cynical commentary on everything from politics to pink purses. But it never goes much beyond that. There is a trace of the main character going through some catharsis and the storyline of a very talented and scary little girl forcing her way into stardom, but mostly it is supposed to read like the journals and diaries of the narrator. Except, it is never a convincing reason to have this collection of memories, social commentaries, and anecdotal stories as one loooong story of 5 days. It seems more like a good excuse for Mungan not to edit much of the writing and just spew out whatever comes to mind. In fact, there are some little paragraphs 200 pages apart from each other that read like revised versions, some sentences that are almost exactly repeated in the same paragraph. In the end, when I finished the book, I wondered why it wasn't done in 300 pages instead of 500 something. The answer seems to be that 300 pages were not enough to serve us up with all of the cynical and humorous commentary on life and everything about life.… (more)