Dear Shameless Death is Latife Tekin’s first novel, and she wrote this in 1983. The author has been discussed a lot with this first novel; allegedly imitating Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the magical realism in the book. But, it is an autobiographical novel; it also describes society. However, the first thing to know is that this book is a must-read, great book.
Dear Shameless Deat, when read independently from what is written above (as I do so), take the reader to their childhoods in a snap. It turns out to be a novel that makes you grow, cry, laugh, harass, kill and revive with itself. Maybe the children of the present are not growing up with djinns – or whatever your elders call them, but many of us have grown up with djinns that will leap from here and there. Some of us had a childhood in which even the most naive things were sin.
In this beautiful novel, you will migrate from village to city with Dirmit, Huvat, Atiye, Halit, Mahmut, Seyit, Zekiye, Nuğber and all the characters whose names I do not remember, leaving the djinns of the village and dealing with the djinns of the city. As you read what the children of Atiye and Huvat deal in the town, you will turn around and look at yourself, pity Dirmit’s state, get angry with Atiye, and be surprised at Huvat. You will wonder how many Dirmits there are in this country and you want to save them one by one. Then you will see that you are Dirmit.
You may not have grown up with demons, but you grew up with the defects, ambitions and failures of this “modern world”, after all, these were your demons. After throwing these thoughts aside, you will fall into the trouble of chickweed. You will look out the window while thinking why you don’t know the chickweed and you will see that the only thing you can recognise in the concrete forest is concrete and the like. You will be sad, and you will return to the book. In fact, whatever you do, you will always want to return to this book after a while. Dear Shameless Death will be a book that will grasp you with its narration, subject and characters. Please read this book; you won’t regret it.
Dear Shameless Death
A strange, magical story or a young girl growing up in modern Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to her traumatic move to the big city. Based on her own childhood experiences, Latife Tekin’s literary debut marked a turning point in Turkish fiction. Set against the pressures of a so rapidly changing society it concentrates on a daughter’s struggle against her overbearing mother. Fantastic and hallucinatory, Dear Shameless Death provides fascinating insights into what it means to be a woman growing up in Turkey today.
Latife Tekin
Latife Tekin is one of the most influential Turkish female authors. She was born in 1957 in Kayseri, Turkey. So she continued her education in Istanbul. In 1983, her famous novel Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (Dear Shameless Death) was publish. The magic realism in the book was so drew from the Anatolian folklore and traditions.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
