أدب تركي

This final book written by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet tests the borders between fiction and memoir. Set in 1925, in Izmir, Turkey, its protagonist-narrator, Ahmet, a Communist Party member who shares many biographical details with Hikmet himself, is hiding out in a stone cottage. He is being pursued by the secret police as he tries to set up an underground printing press. Using a cinematic technique, Hikmet experiments with the fluidity of time and memory, flashing back to his/Ahmet’s earlier years in Turkey and Russia and forward to the years and experiences to come. He creates shots of his/Ahmet’s life from multiple angles: as a university student in Moscow in his early twenties, infatuated with a Russian girl and caught up in the euphoria of revolutionary Communism; as a self-styled revolutionary in Turkey, spending years in and out of prisons; and as a sixty-year-old exile in a very different Moscow, taking stock of a life committed to utopian ideals. Life’s Good, Brother captures everyday exigencies as well as the passionate undercurrents of Hikmet’s tumultuous life.