A Highly Unreliable Account of a Madhouse is one of the best books I’ve read this year. It has a sprawling narrative that drags the reader through time and place alway bringing them back to the madhouse. Along the road, it get to some comic highs and tragic lows. Ayfer Tunç very kindly answered some questions I had about the book.
Translation By Merve Pehlivan.
Luke: Could you start by telling me a little bit about your influences as a writer both from inside and outside literature?
Ayfer: I’m primarily influenced by life itself. I’ve always been interested in life and life stories of all kinds of people. Some writers draw their stories from inside their beings, from their unconscious; they develop an urge for writing with their own experiences, the philosophy on which their lives are based. I am of course interested in my inner self too but I mostly collect stories from outside as a writer. My main job is to observe humans and life.
Luke: I have a very cheeky question. Could the book be renamed A Highly Unreliable Account of the History of Turkey?
Ayfer: Certainly. That’s the trick of the novel. In one sense, it’s a panorama of Turkey spanning a century, with viewpoints of people from Turkey on knowledge, aesthetics and life creating a picture of Turkey as a whole. Is this a sort of madhouse? In a humorous way, the answer is yes. But I don’t think that this is a situation specific to Turkey, I think almost every society may be considered a madhouse occasionally, or as in the case of ours, most of the time.
Luke: What was the initial spark of The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse?
Ayfer: The novel has an interesting background. Inspired by “Notebooks of a Not-Mad Person”, a short story by underestimated writer Feyyaz Kayacan, my writer friend Murat Gülsoy and I wanted to co-author a story. I was thinking of expanding a secondary character from this short story. As I was researching mental health hospitals in Turkey on the internet, I stumbled upon a very short history of a mental health hospital in a Black Sea town. It was no longer than a paragraph but was very impressive. It told about how a group of Greek, Armenian and Turkish citizens in the Ottoman times joined their finances to found that hospital. That was the first spark. I first came up with the idea of a chief physician with a desire to write the history of that hospital, then it progressed into something wildly different from the classical definition of a novel.
Luke: One of the things that is remarkable about The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse is its incredible structure of stories connected to stories that loop away from the madhouse through time and space and then connect back again. Practically, as you were writing, how did you keep all of these elements and characters together in your head and manage all the connections between them? I sort of imagine you sitting at home with a cork board and a lot of red strings like a conspiracy theorist.
Ayfer: I didn’t do any particular work for the first fifty or sixty pages; I just let the stories flow to see what would happen. From the very beginning, I intended, of course, to link them together. When I arrived at a point I anticipated, I needed to keep a record. I don’t work with things like cork boards; I can see things better on paper mostly. Therefore, I took a notebook and dedicated one page for almost every year, recording the characters who were born, who died or were still alive in that year. I noted social elements, developments of that specific period that could impact the lives of the characters. September 6-7 Events, Wealth Tax, the September 12 Coup and even the opening of borders with Serbia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Over time, I went further back in history. Stories began to overflow from my notebooks. But I must add that although I do not trust my everyday memory, I have a very strong memory of the things I write. I remember almost every sentence that I write around the time I’m involved in that particular writing. Hence it wasn’t too much of a problem for me to connect the dots between the characters. I’ve only checked my notebooks a couple of times to verify. I did find a couple of mistakes which I corrected in the novel.
Luke: This is a book that could have gone on forever. How did you know where to start and finish the story and what steps did you take to insure that the book came together to make a compelling ending?
Ayfer: I wish I could write this book forever; I actually have many other stories that didn’t make it in the book. I had found the starting point as I was beginning to write: An associate professor of psychology gives a lecture at a hospital. But as I proceeded to write, I felt the need to attach some significance to the date of that lecture and I set it on February 14, Valentine’s Day. When I decided that the book contained all the noteworthy pieces of the Turkey panorama that I wanted to formulate, I moved onto the conclusion. Needless to say, I wrote this book twelve years ago in 2008. So many things have changed in Turkey within the span of these twelve years, bringing about new characters and new pieces to add to the puzzle. If I wrote it today, maybe it would be a far more voluminous book. I must also add that writing for me is a twilight activity. It is within that twilight that I spontaneously find the details that form the characters or the plot that informs the very character of the novel. That’s why I never start writing with absolute decisions I know that the process of writing itself will later open up ways that will surprise even me.
Luke: The British novelist Philip Pullman says in one of his essays that the narrator is the most interesting character in fiction. I think that is certainly true for the narrator in The Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse. Do you have an idea of who your narrator is? How did you construct the voice of the narrator in the story?
Ayfer: What takes up most of my time in all of my novels is the identity of the narrator and how they will narrate the story to us. I begin so many times, delete, start anew. I experiment with so many types of narrators from first person to omniscient narrator and then find what I’m looking for. In the Madhouse, a narrative style was born on its own from the very first sentences: Ironic, derisive, sometimes angry, a non-person but almost with personality traits. I never wondered who the narrator would be. I actually don’t use such ironic language in my writing, humor or dark humor is a secret weapon that I use every time but very minimally. But this novel compelled me, so to speak, into an ironic and critical language.
Luke: The book is consistently funny, but it is often a dark sense of humour. How do you create humour from darkness and what did you do to avoid nihilism at the same time?
Ayfer: It was the narrator that determined the humorous aspect of the novel, I dare say. The ironic and cunning perspective of the narrator added a natural humor. Meanwhile, what we call life is the union of “laughing quince, weeping pomegranate.” Laughing is the most important thing keeps us going amid darkness. The most razor-sharp, brilliant humor in a society is born in its darkest times. Unfortunately, the history of Turkey is rife with dark pages. Therefore, the lives of people bear deep imprints of this darkness. Humor is an uprising against the darkness in which we live, it keeps us going and keeps nihilism at bay. This is because it’s very easy to slip into nihility in times of hopelessness. Yet human beings are also hardwired to survive and instinctively find tools to keep themselves going. Stories from wartimes are an example. With the help of the humorous tone I’ve captured in the novel, I managed to not even come close to nihilism. I actually am known for the melancholic feel of my writing, in fact my readers occasionally complain about the weight of such melancholy or sorrow. But the very structure of this book was not only not compatible with melancholy, it was also a novel I had a lot of fun writing.
Luke: Throughout the book the characters experience all sorts of domestic abuse, from physical assault, sexual violence and also more psychological abuse to do with money and power. These issues are of course not limited to Turkey. However, the book unfortunately speaks to this moment in Turkish society when femicide is increasing as is domestic abuse. What do you think your book is trying to say about the darkness that can be found within families?
Ayfer: An American writer I hold very dear, William Faulkner, says “There are three subject matters for writing: Love, death, money.” In every society we see stories born out of variations of these three elements. But in societies like ours that try to preserve the traditional elements in living practice, these stories take place far more frequently and more intensely. This is partly due to the fact that we lead more closed and collective lives compared to western societies. But I think the main issue is doubting one’s perpetuity. In his book Curtain, Milan Kundera talks about how his country Chekia (Czechoslovakia at the time) lived in fear of a threat to its existence, hence events that could be perceived unimportant in countries with no such fear were experienced in an exaggerated way in Czechoslovakia, almost as though on top of a stage. Ours is a country that preserves the traditional elements of its existence due to a doubt in its own perpetuity, for which violence is used as an instrument and in a severe fashion. Violence is born within families, the smallest unit of a society. Keeping family secrets is encoded in our subconscious. There is an idiom in Turkish: “A broken arm is kept within the sleeve.” Idioms are basic resources that expose the basic reflexes of a society. Literature in Turkey, particularly women writers, have pointed out to this violence in their writing for many years. Literature’s job is not to dictate, to lecture society, the writer is not a wise person sitting on top of a society, but literature helps us develop the reflexes to understand the society better, to establish cause and effect relationships. Today, voices opposing domestic abuse rise not only from within literature but from many other areas too. I see a lot of hope in this. Women in Turkey are now aware that violence is not something natural and are determined to not keep silent despite all the pressure from men who retain all sorts of power.
Luke: One of the major themes of this book is sex. The book lays out a broader spectrum of sexual practice within Turkey than any other novel I’ve read. What do you think your book is saying about the realities of sex and sexuality in Turkey?
Ayfer: In societies like Turkey, sex is described in the most indirect way possible but is experienced with far more variation than it’s thought. This can be observed in almost all impulsive societies. A person not individuated is a person yielding to their impulses, controlled by these impulses. The Turkish* society is one in which the majority of people have not been able to complete their individuation. If you take a look at the reality shows on Turkish television, they are all centered around the relationship between a man and a woman and every possible dimension of that relationship, sex being chief of them. When I set out to write this novel, my purpose was not to portray how people in Turkey are challenged by sex but I didn’t think I should avoid the fact that sex is an element that gives shape to a portrait of Turkey.
Luke: This last question doesn’t come directly from me but from our contributor Şule Akdoğan, who wrote a really excellent piece on your book for the Bosphorus Review of Books. She asks: What do you think about the reception of your books abroad? How has the reception of your books abroad differed from their reception in Turkey? Are there any challenges you have faced with respect to reception and circulation of your books both in Turkey and abroad?
Ayfer: You might be surprised but I am not really interested in my books’ recognition abroad. Of course I’d like them to be published and read. My books have been translated into many languages and sometimes I receive feedback that makes me very happy from people in countries I’d least expect. But I am also a realistic writer. I am aware of the goings on in the international publishing market. A British or German reader or a reader that speaks another language treats with similar distance Turkish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Kurdish, Korean, Farsi, Thai literature and even Danish, Norwegian etc. literature although they’re European. One other reason behind my lack of interest is something that may be defined as resentment. Western readers approach literature from Turkey with what I refer to as a “new orientalist” perspective. They expect exotic novels full of elements below their standards or publishers promote this understanding to create such expectations. However, I and many other writer friends of mine pursue genuine literature. We do not write our books with a concern for the possibility that they might be published in the West. This is actually not only an important issue for writers from Turkey but for all writers not writing in a major language, in fact in any language other English. This is what British novelist Tim Parks too complains about. In his book Ben Buradan Okuyorum in Turkish (Where I’m Reading From t.n.), he says that many authors compromise fundamental aspects of their own literature for the sake of being an international writer, which results in all novels looking like each other. In fact genuine literature is not and must not be a market commodity.
* Translator’s Note: The writer avoids the word Türk (Turkish) when she refers to the people/ culture/ literature etc of Turkey, given the multiethnic population of the country.