Mai ve Siyah

Last night, after almost 7 years, I finished reading Mai ve Siyah by Halit Ziya Uşakligil. I was given a copy of the novel by a work colleague Didem in 2010 when I was living in Istanbul as a sort of gift — she couldn't handle all of the parenthesized Ottoman vocabulary and so had long since given up reading it — and began trying to read it before I could really read a novel in Turkish. I believe I made it about as far as chapter 3 when Ahmet Cemil goes to see his friend in Erenköy, but to be fair I was basically glossing over words and coming up with my own fanciful ideas about what was going on. I did understand something of the first 10 pages and tried to use allusions to Ahmet Cemil's staring at the sky "baran-i elmas!" in my novel gurbetten sonra (nice to know that I hadn't misunderstood that part at least). I put the book on my list of Turkish novels I assigned to myself as required reading for one of my PhD comps exams, and now I was (in a way) paid to read it. Now after carrying this ugly little blue book around to 8 different apartments/houses in multiple cities, and years of training myself to be a competent and critical reader of Turkish, I was finally able to not only read it, but to enjoy it. The book is a special artifact of my interest in Turkish literature.  
The novel follows its central character Ahmet Cemil, an aspiring poet, as he tries to hustle in Ottoman Istanbul. His father dies while he is young (I believe being an orphan was a requirement of characters in Ottoman novels) and he is still in school and Ahmet has to try to find a way to make ends meet and support his family. His school buddy Hüseyin Nazmi helps convince him to work as a translator for a newspaper and this marks his introduction into the world of printing. He is able to quickly work his way up in the world, although his true passion lies in his own aspirations to write avant-garde poetry influenced by French work. And he is full of the stuff. There are passages which go on for pages and pages about the color of the sky, or how Ahmet's feelings of sadness and melancholy are overwhelming him. It parodies itself. Uşakligil was the foremost writer among the literary movement known as servet-i fünun which was formed through a magazine of the same name. The language is baroque, metaphoric, and in no rush to get anywhere (which explains why Ahmet Mithat criticized it as remote from common speech and why I had such a hard time reading it in 2010). Ahmet Cemil is given the opportunity to become a part-owner and operator of the print house along with his new brother-in-law, it all gets screwed up when he realizes that his sister is being verbally and physically abused. Ahmet is able to finally present his poetry to some literatis, and is well-received, but it is all over shadowed by his own personal misfortunes. Oh, and he is also in (shallow) love with his friend's sister Lamia but she gets betrothed to someone else. 
I really empathized with the character of Ahmet Cemil in a way that made me think that maybe we can't really sympathize with characters in a visceral way without having actually lived close analogies of the same situations in our own lives. As a fellow aspiring literati who has to do a lot of hustling to make ends meet, and always fells the superego compulsion to devote more time to literature, I know the feeling. The scene in particular where Ahmet tries to tutor a rich kid and doesn't have any books to use and quickly runs out of topics to cover, I know the feeling. Having to bus all over Istanbul just to make it to appointments and meetings (I used to wake up at 6am to catch a double decker bus in İçerenköy which went all the way over the bridge and then took a mini-bus up to the ulusoy headquarters in Levant then down to the metrobus all the way out to Cevizlibağ to catch the actual train to the kızılay in çapa-şehremin (taking a nap in the garden at the hospital before my double lessons) and then continuing on the train all the way to the speed ferry in Kabataş to make it back to Bostancı for my final private lesson), I know the feeling. I'm just saying cerebral sympathy doesn't really cut it for me in literature.