Sait Faik Abasıyanık
A useless man
Adelphi, 264 pages, 19 euros
One is hesitant to use the word masterpiece, but perhaps this collection of stories of a Turk who died of alcohol at the age of 48 in 1954 is. We owe it to two valuable young scholars, Bellingeri and Vazzana. The texts were written over several years, having as a background neighborhoods, houses, taverns, the day and night of Istanbul, the most beautiful city in Europe, divided in half with Asia and which has its charm in this. . They have little plot and weak developments but are confronted with a varied and animated life and almost always poor, proletarian and marginal.
Many fleeting encounters, many vital and mostly not very cheerful figures, caught in the essentials and soon forgotten to make room for others, on other nights or in other wanderings: “People draw me to themselves with the force of a magnet”. Workers, children, mothers, merchants, seafarers, drunkards, prostitutes, healthy and sick, wise and out of phase … Sait has rightly been called the “Turkish Chekhov”, but in these stories the events are not always as important as the atmosphere , lively and suspended, always melancholy. Sait had found himself a writer, he said, because driven by curiosity, but also by strong solidarity. Claiming his being an eminently Southern writer. Baudelaire and Kavafis would have liked it but also Camus and not just Chekhov. Try not to lose it, as there are few books that can remain in our hearts today.
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