Review: Snapping Point, Aslı Biçen
By Luke Frostick
Greek radio stations announced that Andalıç had sunk, just like their island. Who’d have thought it would don a lifebelt and go swimming?
Snapping Point, a newly translated novel by Aslı Biçen, tells the story of a seemingly idyllic island somewhere on Turkey’s Aegean coast that, following a fierce earthquake, is detached from the seabed and floats around the Aegean Sea. As the island floats away, the municipality thereon grows increasingly authoritarian and the protagonists must find ways of resisting.
The story follows Cemal, a shopkeeper dealing with a fallout from his absent father’s death. It also focuses on Jülide, a student trying to find her place in the world. Both of them are working their way through challenging relationships- Cemal with his fiancée Saliha who is suffering from depression and Jülide has to get out of an abusive relationship. As they are working through these problems and the island detaches from the mainland, they both develop a growing understanding that life on the island is more corrupt than they thought and that they might have to take responsibility and action to fix it.
I was reminded of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow reading this book. The premise is ultimately the same, minus the speculative element of the floating island. They are both about a community’s underlying tensions flaring up once it is cut off from the outside world. However, where the difference emergeds is that the tensions in Snow are about the ideological split within Turkish society at large. However, the fault lines within Snapping Point are much more to do with petty corruption and backbiting amongst the police and municipal administration that lurch towards fascism as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Both are important and relevant perspectives on the nature of political life in Turkey. The book also touches on themes of depression within relationships, and a contribution to the ever necessary conversation about domestic abuse and misogyny. All the themes are well explored with layers of nuance that do not distract from the narrative.
Though I liked the themes and the characters in the book, it has some structural weaknesses. The snapping point, when the island begins its floating journey, is really late in the story. While of course it is important to establish strong characters, motivations and the seeds of conflict in the early stages of a novel, and there is some compelling storytelling there, the hook of the story is pushed quite far back. To put the story structure in Campbellian terms, there is no question that the ‘crossing of the threshold’ moment is the island breaking away and floating off into the Aegean. This happens about two-thirds of the way into the story rather than approximately a quarter of the way in, as would traditionally be the case.
The problem that this creates is that the writer then has to seriously escalate the pace of the novel, compressing the narrative, rush past important details and resolutions of character arcs in the last third. Moreover, the book ends really abruptly. It could have done with a greater amount of time spent on the floating island either with an expanded runtime. Alternatively, it could have moved the snapping point earlier in the narrative to give the uniqueness of the scenario time to play out and for all the characters to have their stories resolved fully. The other problem that this might address is that the novelty of the island is underused. Of course the whole landmass being detached creates problems for the islanders as does the approach to Greece. However, not a lot is done with the extremely novel premise of an island floating round the Aegean, beyond separating the islanders from the rest of the world and depriving them of resources. The book could have leaned into its premise with far more gusto.
The prose is nice throughout. It gets a little close to overwritten in places but never crosses that threshold. Moreover, the descriptions are evocative and the dialog handy. Credit must be given to Translator Feyza Howell whose collaboration with Istros Books is helping to get Turkish novels out in English and producing some excellent literature..
Although there are criticisms of this book that can be made and I wish it had been bolder with its premise, I enjoyed it. The characters are strong and well-realised. Furthermore, the book is dealing with important issues that remain relevant in Turkey today. Certainly, if more books by Biçen come out in English, I’ll be excited to read them.
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