Itvuran

I don't recommend reading this book—or, for that matter, writing a book like it—to anyone. Nor do I intend to go on at length about it, because there isn't much to say. The stories strike me as petty in substance, weak in plot, and wan in description. It may well be that Ayyub Giyas stands very high as a writer, that he has weighty novels and translations to his name, that he commands deep literary knowledge. I take no issue with any of that. I have read only the stories in Itvuran, and what I write concerns this book alone.

The texts have not been edited—this is not a suspicion but a fact. Sentences are at times unintelligible; the author's meaning is unclear. The story “The Picture Book” opens like this: “The world had grown cold… Warming the insides of his palms, he kept lifting and changing his feet, which, invisible within the snow, had sunk to the ankles.” First question: with what, exactly, is our character warming “the insides of his palms”? Second: what does it mean to “lift his feet from the ground and change them”—change them for what? There isn't even a comma to help us see which adverbial belongs to which verb—warming or lifting from the ground. What, in short, is the character doing? One sentence later we read: “…the frost of those eyes made his body— which he could warm with nothing—tremble.” But just a moment ago he was warming his palms with something; how is it that now his body cannot be warmed with anything? The next paragraph begins: “On the shirt he wore over his body—an empty body—most of the buttons were missing.” I copy this exactly, punctuation and all. What does “over his body—an empty body—“ mean? Which part of this body is “empty”? And two sentences later, Giyas writes: “Fixing his head on the ground, he looked at his sockless shoes and at his bare feet showing beneath his short trousers.” This business of “fixing one's head on the ground” also turned up in the academic Kamal Abdulla—more's the pity. Dear writers: a head is not what you aim; the eyes are what one fixes on something. And shoes aren't “sockless”; feet are sockless or not. A man wearing shoes is not barefoot.

In almost every story, nearly every sentence is rudimentary—far from literary—of the sort you'd find in a schoolchild's composition. For example, in “The King's Daughter,” the author writes: “While we were talking, the ball the children threw fell between us; I angrily tossed the ball back to them, they sensed I was angry and laughed, and that laughter annoyed me. I remembered the balls that Mohsun went through into the goal I was guarding (Yes, the sentence really is exactly like this). I said he was hitting them low—on purpose, since he knew my weak spot—and we fought…”

From “Children's Toys”: “In the yard, there was no sound but the neighbors' whispering and my mother's wailing. On tiptoe I went over to my mother, laid my head on her knee, sobbed, and—gasping—asked after Samad. My mother pressed my head to her breast and cried inwardly. Everyone was crying…” So which is it—neighbors whispering while your mother wails, or everyone crying? One moment your head is on her knee, the next it's against her chest… If everyone is crying, how are whispers audible; if your mother is keening, why are the neighbors off to the side whispering? A little later: “…the heaviness of his breath lent his infant, guileless, guiltless face a divine cast.”

From “Zirrama” (not translated, translator's note): “Without arriving at the identity of the person who wanted to get on my nerves, I stepped aside...” What does it mean to arrive at someone's identity in this context? In that scene the narrator is hurrying to the toilet: “The nuisance practically climbed on top of me. I clenched my kidneys and barely held myself…” A few paragraphs later—apparently to show how urgently he needs the toilet—we get: “The stabbing in my kidneys returned; my eyes teared up.” Dear author, when people need the toilet their kidneys don't seize up, and no one can “clench” a kidney. Kidney pain is what one gets with stones. The toilet has nothing to do with kidneys; at most it has to do with the bladder—and believe me, you don't want to clench that…

As for the book's physical production, I can't comment—there isn't any.

In any case, I won't write a response longer than the book itself. As I said at the outset: I do not recommend writing such a book, and I do not recommend reading this one.