When Historical Fiction Is a Crime | The New Republic

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Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s most skillful historical novelists, lives in solitary confinement in a cell four meters long, at Silivri Prison, Europe’s largest penal facility. In I’ll Never See This World Again, his fifteenth book, and the first he wrote from prison, Altan recalled the passing comment of a judge who held the author’s fate in his hands: “If only you had stuck to writing novels and kept your nose out of political affairs.”<br>Love in the Days of Rebellion<br>by Ahmet Altan, translated by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely<br>Buy on Bookshop<br>Europa Editions, 496 pp., $19.00<br>Like a Sword Wound<br>by Ahmet Altan, translated by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely<br>Buy on Bookshop<br>Europa Editions, 352 pp., $17.00<br>Altan’s punishment for that sin—he was charged with “sending subliminal messages” to topple Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—has been severe. “I will never see a sky unframed by the walls of a courtyard,” he realized upon receiving an aggravated life sentence in 2018. But politics has been an abiding theme of his work since the mid-1970s, when he cut his teeth as a young reporter. For much of his career, eroticism and the intrigues of Turkish politics had vitalized Altan’s writings and helped make him a household name. In 1982, aged 32, his debut novel launched a career marked by controversy and bestsellers: His second novel, Trace on the Water (1985), was found “obscene” by a court, which ordered police to burn it; Cheating, Altan’s erotic novella from 2002, sold over half a million copies, including one purchased by the cop who initially arrested him and chatted about its plot as the police van carried the giant of Turkish literature to Silivri Prison.

It was the Ottoman Quartet, an epic novel spanning the turbulent era between 1873, the year Sultan Abdülhamid II was enthroned, and 1915, when 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians died in an act of genocide, that earned Altan the distinction of a leading Turkish historical novelist, alongside younger authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. The Quartet is Altan’s life’s work (he hopes to complete its last volume once he regains access to a library) and proof that even while he “stuck to writing novels,” in his judge’s words, Altan couldn’t “keep his nose out of political affairs.” The saga’s first two volumes, Like a Sword Wound (1998) and Love in the Days of Rebellion (2001), now published in fine English translations by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely, probe Turkish historiography’s nationalist dichotomies between the autocratic Abdülhamid and progressive patriots who dethroned the Ottoman sultan. Altan’s Quartet shows that continuities, rather than ruptures, have defined the history of Turkish autocracy over the past century: Germanophile Young Turks were as tyrannical as Abdülhamid. Altan reaches this conclusion after raising a baffling question: Was “the March 31 Incident” of 1909 (an Islamist uprising to defend Abdülhamid’s absolute rule, whose suppression gave anti-sultan generals dictatorial powers) a Young Turk ploy?<br>Bridging Turkey’s past and present, in which such sinister moves to gain power are customary, Altan uses a smart conceit: Osman, his middle-aged protagonist, lives in modern Turkey and receives visits from family members who lived a century ago. These “transparent bodies” speak to him “in weak, broken voices,” granting Osman access to archives of familial and national history as he sits among heaps of tin cans in a dilapidated mansion. Perhaps it is this direct link to the present that has angered the authorities so much, the way his work likens the country’s problems today with its foundational shortcomings. In Turkey, a country that has insistently imprisoned its famous novelists over the past century, the treatment of Altan’s life and work is a warning to others willing to submit Turkish identity to a similarly probing critique.

Altan is skillful in laying the groundwork for this volume’s milieu: the penultimate decade of the Ottoman Caliphate. Once containing Islam’s Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, “the sick man of Europe” crumbles in the face of Western powers by the 1900s. The book’s characters orbit around Osman’s great-grandfather Yusuf, the sheikh of a Sufi monastery in Istanbul, the spiritual heart of a capital intent on severing ties with its Islamic past. Hikmet, a fragile bookworm who aligns with Young Turks (while reading their revolutionary oath, he puts a hand on the Qur’an and another on a pistol), marries Yusuf’s estranged wife, Mehpare, a free-spirited woman keen to realize her desires. “The only way to avoid punishment was to live in mansions with gardens large enough to conceal these sins,” she muses in a moment of self-reflection. The couple does live in a mansion with a large garden, owns a fancy six-seater landau with its team of two ponies and four Hungarian trove horses, leading a jealousy-inducing open marriage that almost destroys Hikmet...