Customer Reviews

Sleeping In The Forest: Stories And Poems (Middle East Literature in Translation)

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Sait Faik (1906-1954) wrote realistic short stories about poor Turkish, Greek, and Armenian villagers, fisherman, and Istanbul city folk. These stories are literary, and worth reading, because Faik unrelentingly seeks and tells the truth --as he sees it-- about his characters.

Professor Talat Halman describes Faik, in the scholarly introduction, as a lyrical writer with a deep sympathy for his subjects. But I find little lyricism, though it's possible lyricism would emerge from a better and more consistent translation. (In contrast, Orhan Pamuk benefits from a translator with a consistently clear and elegantly simple style.) If Faik has any sympathy for his characters he reveals it by making the effort to understand them and to preserve their memory, rather than by expressing sentiment.

Instead of sentiment, Faik gives us hard observation of his characters, the sad facts. We see his beggars, barbers, and thieves pictured without any element of charm, spirituality, heroism, or hope. If a Faik story starts with the capture of a pair of pathetic thieves, you can bet they'll be worse off at the end. Many of these stories could be journalism, transformed into fiction by a few changes in names. These stories are sometimes hard to read because they end so unhappily, there is much pain. Faik must have lived in pain, for he died of alcoholism at age 48.

Several of the stories are not `factual' fiction but are structured instead like shifting, disoriented dreams. I can't think of a good comparison, perhaps Kafka, if he had written about impoverished Greek fisherman.

Faik's interest in Greeks and Armenians is unusual for a writer in a nationalistic period in Turkey. My understanding is that most Greeks left with the exchange of population in 1923, when Faik would have been 17. Perhaps there is a subtle humanistic message here: Greeks and Armenians and Turks are the same after all.