Adalet Agaoglu
Curfew
Trans. from the Turkish by John Goulden
Austin, Texas: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1997. Pp. 250. $12.95
Reviewed by Dilek Direnc
Curfew is an exciting novel for readers who are willing to go beyond the boundaries of their own geography, culture, and history. It presents a fascinating picture of the Turkey of 1980, a country under the dark shadow of an oppressive mood of uncertainty, fear, and isolation-metaphorically represented by curfew-only months before the military coup of September 12.
One of the leading writers of Turkey at the moment, Adalet Agaoglu has long since established herself as a prominent playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories and essays. Born in 1926, only six years after the coming of the new Turkish Republic, she studied French Literature at Ankara University. The first decades of her career as a writer were devoted to theater and to the writing of plays. It was in the seventies that she turned to the novel, and since the publication of her first novel in 1973 all of them have been widely read, gone through several editions, and been praised by the critics. In addition to many literary awards for her novels, Agaoglu received the Turkish Presidential Award of Merit in 1995, presented to her for her contribution to art and culture.
In Curfew, first published in 1984, Agaoglu portrays an intriguing picture of present-day Turkey, caught between its theocratic and authoritarian past and the secular and Western-oriented present, suffering the pains of both industrialization and cultural transformation, torn between its fading traditional values and those of the newly emerging westward-looking culture. Agaoglu makes excellent use of this social and historical material. However, Curfew does not only provide the reader with psychological, cultural, and political insights into late twentieth-century Turkey; it is also an exciting novel in terms of its writer’s technical and artistic choices to present this material. Experimenting with various narrative techniques and adapting them to the purposes of her own novel, Agaoglu creates a literary work of art, not just a documentary recording a specific period in the life of a society.
Curfew is about “the wounds the society inflicts upon the lives of the individuals” and “the laments of a society made up of wounded lives” (175). The “story time” of the novel spans only three hours, prior to the start of curfew at 2:00 a.m. in early June; however, in this limited timeframe, the reader enters into the minds of seven characters, witnessing how each one spends this brief time. The novel is composed of seven chapters, each devoted to one character. Flashbacks and complex narratives reveal these individual lives: their histories, their frustrations and disappointments in the past, and their hopes, or hopelessness, for the future. Curfew juxtaposes the stream of consciousness of these seven characters and thereby requires a careful reader to differentiate between the real, remembered, and imagined events.
Murat and his elder sister Kismet are from a wealthy land-owning family in Eskisehir, a provincial town of Anatolia. Murat has long deserted his town for Istanbul and his family for Selmin (a pop singer), the woman he desperately loves. Their relationship, however, is now over after a brief affair between Selmin and Murat’s uncle Ferit. Widowed as a young woman and devoted to her children, Murat’s mother Turkan still feels the heart-rending grief of her son’s desertion. Her brother Ferit is a cultured and well-educated businessman with a strong belief in industrialization. Kardelen, a bright, sensitive young woman from a working-class family, is a close friend of Kismet. She is getting ready for her approaching wedding while still recovering from the horrible experience of being raped when in police custody. Selmin, her sister, and their aristocratic mother, Neval, are all going through a rapid decline and degeneration. Kismet, a timid young woman and an obedient daughter so far, has now gathered her strength to run away from her arranged marriage and to go to Istanbul for a new beginning. Hers is the last chapter of the book, and the fact that the novel ends with Kismet’s very first act of self-assertion speaks for itself.
The translator, John Goulden, prefers to remain loyal to the Turkish original instead of using a more idiomatic English. The fact that Agaoglu is a writer who plays a great deal with the language complicates Goulden’s already difficult task. However, his sensitive translation does justice to her style and reflects it. Curfew makes an established and deserving writer accessible to English readers. At present Turkish literature is experiencing a productive surge, with many new and exciting writers being published who experiment with the genre of the novel and use the language more creatively than ever before. Hopefully the interest in contemporary Turkish literature will be lasting, and this literature will continue to be made available to readers of English.