Defne Suman, Circle , translated from Turkish by Sabina Bakšić and Alena Ćatović.
WRITTEN BY: Sanita Delić
Turkish writer Defna Suman's novel Krug explores memory as a delicate phenomenon, suggesting that when translated to paper it acquires a new vitality, and sometimes a universality within which only what can be named can be overcome.
While through the narration of the attentive observer, seventy-five-year-old Pericles Drakos, we pay attention to the smells and colors, the refraction of light through old, dusty windows, hear the even beats of raindrops or feel the strong embrace of the wind from the Bosphorus, we pass through the alleys of Istanbul witnessing what has been spared from oblivion.
The story is set during the global coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), in the Krug building, where thirty-year-old Leyla moves in, searching for a place reminiscent of old Istanbul and believing that time is hidden in space . Pericles falls in love with her at first sight, which leads him to think more deeply about fate and the new era to which he has failed to transfer either love or life from the past. In order to get closer to her and break through the walls of secrets that surrounded her life, he begins to write memoirs whose content becomes inextricably intertwined with their present. Thus, the narrative takes on a nonlinear form that offers readers a direct comparison of the former Istanbul with the current, modern version, in which historical monuments and buildings protected by law are mostly destroyed for the purpose of unplanned and stylistically monstrous modernization, and for the benefit of a few investors who operate from dark corners, invisible to the eye of the ordinary citizen. The story will become an antidote that will drive away sadness, and Pericles will try to incorporate his whole life into writing, he will surrender to it entirely, and it will in turn ensure him the presence and affection of Leila, who will tirelessly process his written thoughts and prepare them for publication.
Woven from countless sincere emotions, from first loves to bouts of jealousy, from an initially close relationship with parents to an alliance with a local mafia boss, this story will be marked mostly by the violent events that befell members of the Greek community who had lived in Turkey for generations in the 1950s, as well as their mass persecution due to Greek-Turkish disputes over the status of Cyprus. Accused of betraying their homeland and sending money to Greek organizations in Cyprus, Greeks were forced to leave their homes, which were then confiscated by the state. The most traumatic point in his past is September 1955, known to history as the Istanbul Persecution (or Pogrom), when material damage was done to private homes, shops, pharmacies, churches and schools, and physical pain was inflicted on many Greeks and raped Greek women who then left Istanbul in search of refuge. This event is etched deep into Pericles' existence, because then all carelessness and childish joy ceases and he grows up overnight. After an even more intense persecution in 1964, his parents find salvation in Athens, the love he experiences with Ulker and Markel is doomed, and he secures his survival and keeping himself alive thanks to a strange friendship with Nežad, a mafia boss whom he met during his military service. Everything else that seemed ordinary took on a new form through imagination and struggle with the force of time, through which a memory echoed loudly, in which the narrator feels exiled, abandoned, lonely .
Through the act of writing, Pericles gradually undergoes a symbolic purification, freeing himself from the pain of past events that have become less and less talked about. Life offers him the opportunity to fall in love with the present moment anew, while through reminiscences of what was or could have been, he offers to question the official historiography of the former Istanbul and rewrite it with his own story – because we all want to leave behind someone (or something) who witnessed our existence .