When Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told his mother that he wanted to quit school and be an artist, she gave him an earful:
Fortunately, Pamuk left home to become a writer rather than a painter—and without turning either lunatic or lush. He has, however, narrowly avoided prison for having the courage to address matters of historical truth, e.g., the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In today’s Turkey, as one of the characters in Pamuk’s latest novel points out, you can still “end up on trial for insulting Turkishness” simply by speaking unpleasant truths.
It was Pamuk’s last major novel, Snow (2002), a tour de force mixture of magic realism, political roman à clef, social commentary, and rollicking whodunit, that got him hauled into court and nearly incarcerated. In a conversation I had with the distinguished Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, just a few weeks before he was gunned down in Istanbul by a Turkish nationalist in 2007, Dink expressed his affection for Pamuk the man and admiration for the courage and integrity of Pamuk the author. While critical of defects in his country’s government and institutions, Dink never lost his faith in the basic decency of the average Turk. It’s a pity that it took his murder to vindicate that faith, as tens of thousands of mainly Muslim Turks filled the streets of Istanbul mourning him and chanting, “I am Hrant Dink.”
Faith in the decency of ordinary people permeates A Strangeness in My Mind, not because it is a political novel but precisely because it is not. It is a novel about life, for the most part in a very hardscrabble world; it is also about the human capacity for sparking moments of hope, love, and laughter, even in darkness. Its hero is part Candide, part Admirable Crichton, and part Everyman, one of the millions of young peasant villagers from the poorest parts of Anatolia who flooded into Istanbul throughout the 20th century seeking a better life. The novel’s subtitle sums it up admirably: Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karatas, a Seller of Boza, and of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 1969 and 2012 from Many Different Points of View.
How can one explain the significance of being a “seller of boza” to Americans who have never heard of the stuff, much less tasted it? Boza is a mildly alcoholic brew made from cracked wheat, bitter or sweetened, that was almost universally consumed by Ottoman Turks in the centuries when wine and spirits were—at least officially—prohibited. What kvass, another fermented drink (this time made from black bread), was to the peasantry of old Russia, or honey-based mead was to the early Anglo-Saxons, boza is to traditional Stamboulis, especially on winter evenings when its soupçon of alcohol creates a pleasant, warming glow. The boza seller, walking the twilit streets of Istanbul and calling out his wares, was a familiar sight during most of the 20th century, gradually fading as supermarkets and high-rise residential blocks swept away old neighborhoods and old ways. To see Istanbul through the eyes of Mevlut is something like seeing the changing face of Vienna or Berlin through the eyes of one of the last of the Leierkasten men (organ grinders), for boza, like the ancient tunes of the Leierkastenmann, evokes living memories of a near-dead past.
As in all lives, the everyday and the imaginary entangle and overlap, dreams are sometimes more real than reality itself, and love—shimmering, indefinable but undeniable—leads us on. This is particularly true for Mevlut, who falls in love with the prettier of two sisters, is duped into marrying the plain one, and gradually realizes that his “mistaken” wife was the best thing that ever happened to him. As Mevlut’s father-in-law, a raki-swilling old rascal with a good heart and more than his share of peasant wisdom, concludes, “Mevlut and Rayiha are good people. . . . They will have God’s blessing. God loves happy people, who know how to make the best of the little they have. . . . And if they’re happy, then it’s not our place to say any more, is it, son?”
Who can disagree? Except to add that, while some have decried Pamuk’s latest novel for having fewer magic realism bells and whistles than his earlier works, there are times when there is more realism—and more magic—to be found in ordinary lives well lived.
Aram Bakshian Jr., who served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, is a writer in Washington.
