orhan kemal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orhan Kemal (1914 - 1070), was born in Adana, Ceyhan. Many of Kemal’s stories, especially My Father’s house and Idle Years carry hints of the years he spent in exile with his father. The landmark work that depicted his prison years was the novella 72. Koğuş, which was also the first instance of the “prison story” genre in Turkish literature. This novella relates the hardships the convicts had to endure due to poverty and deprivation. The convicts were not only rejected by society, but also had to withstand abuse and isolation inflicted by other convicts. In 1967, Ankara Sanat Tiyatrosu (The Ankara Art Theater) adapted 72. Koğuş for the stage, earning Kemal the “Best Playwright” award of the Ankara Society for Art lovers. Many of his works carry traces of his childhood years spent in cotton fields. His novels deal with the conflicts between wealthy landlords and farm workers, and between factory owners and workers. These novels portray characters from various walks of life; from the small time clerk to the young girl who dreams of becoming a famous singer. After exposing the troubles of workers and wage earners in Anatolia, he wrote novels and stories dealing with the phenomenon of migration, just as he experienced it in his own life. Kemal has been celebrated as the mastermind of dialogues in Turkish literature. His titles are amongst those rare treasures one encounters in life. Only a few other authors can impress and shape the reader like he does. Orhan Kemal shows us the way to gain hope and be optimistic again.
MY FATHER’S HOUSE - THE IDLE YEARS
Being one of the most well-loved books of Orhan Kemal, an author known for including autobiographical elements in his writing, My Father's House is also the first title in the series "The Little Man's Novel".
One of the best examples of a coming-of-age tale in Turkish literature, My Father's House is a prequel to another well-known novel, The Idle Years. Though they can be read independently of one another, these novels carry that subtle world view that is present in all works by Orhan Kemal.
My Father’s House–The Idle Years is an autobiographical novel by Orhan Kemal, one of the giants of Turkish literature.
The novel’s explicit focus is on a boy who grows up pursuing self-realization in a working-class atmosphere.
The story takes place during a period of abrupt transformation when the Republic of Turkey, newly born out of the ashes of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, is adapting to oppressive conditions introduced by a burgeoning capitalism. Scholarship on Orhan Kemal has extensively uncovered and charted his socialist realism and unorthodox look at the history of Turkey, but it has not concerned itself enough with the issue of masculinity, which is an indisputable part of Kemal’s view of labour and political power.
This paper is an initial attempt to approach Kemal’s autobiographical novels with theories of masculinity. I argue that My Father’s House–The Idle Years explores rites of passages into manhood in what can be referred to as a crisis of imperial loss: the boy grows in an attempt to restore his father’s victimized manhood, in a symbolic parallel to the transformation of the disintegrated Ottoman Empire into self-governed nation-states.
Kemal handles the loss metaphorically, using the instability generated by the gender anxieties of a young boy who fails to be like his father to represent the instability generated by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
I examine My Father’s House–The Idle Years as the Oedipalized story of post-Ottoman Turkey.