Derdâ is married off that year to a member of a religious order, who takes his child bride in a chador to London. The first half of the novel follows a girl named Derdâ from the age of eleven, when her mother takes her out of a state boarding school in eastern Turkey. Without the immediacy of a well-drawn first-person narrator, the depiction of the string of abuses endured by the main characters in this work goes beyond gratuitous to become almost flat. Unfortunately, this work also lacks the compelling narrative voice that gripped the reader through the scenes of extreme degradation that punctuated the previous novel. And while the release of that book’s tale of human traffickers operating on the Aegean coincided with intense international interest in the movement across Turkey of refugees, there is no such topical hook to catch attention for “The Few”. “More”, his first novel translated into English, was released by the same publisher in 2016 to high praise from critics, but does not appear to have made any great mark commercially.

Think Chuck Palahniuk or Irvine Welsh on the Bosporus.Īrcade Publishing has taken quite a risk with Günday’s “The Few”, given the book’s harsh subject matter and the writer’s relatively unknown status in the English-speaking world.

These elements have been central to Günday’s work since his 2000 debut, “Kinyas ve Kayra”, and have carried his novels far from the underground to the mainstream, topping Turkey’s bestseller charts and winning awards in Turkey and France. The term refers to a loosely defined genre of fiction, rather than literature that has been produced or distributed secretly or illegally, that generally features anti-heroes engaged in transgressive and explicitly depicted acts of sex, drugs and violence as they ponder existential questions in a stripped-down or colloquial narrative style. The revolt described in these lines from Hakan Günday’s latest novel, “The Few”, is a common feature in literary and poetic works by writers from Charles Bukowski to Turkey’s Metin Kaçan, idiosyncratically grouped together in Turkey as “underground literature”. It’s a feeling more than it’s actual knowledge. “You’re born and before 15 years are up you realise just what kind of a place the world is and you know that you’re just stuck somewhere between birth and death.

Kinyas ve kayra english