Bizim Büyük Çaresizliğimiz

First of all, it's an absurd privilege to be able to read modern Turkish literature in the original, dipping in the richness of the Turkish language and without the wait for or the adulteration of a translation. (Oh how screwed you are if you have to translate one of these to Dutch. Maybe German would be a better target language, but even then… the result would be German.)<br/><br/>The book is more or less a single long letter, or lament of one friend (Ender) to another (Çetin) about a crucial period in their life where they shared their house with a girl (Nihal), how they both fell in love with her and how that ended. That direct address to the reader gives the book a breathlessness that draws you in and keeps you reading, chapter after short chapter.<br/><br/>But the love story is a sideshow to the main act that is the friendship between the two main characters. Nihal herself isn't much more than a prop both for our writer Ender and for the book itself.<br/><br/>And a deep and amazing friendship it is of two lifelong bachelors, sharing an apartment and while having two vastly different lives and personalities, also sharing pretty much everything else with each other. The kind of friendship that isn't <I>that</I> suspect (though of course it is somewhat suspect, because come on…) because this closeness between males is much more accepted in Mediterranean culture. A friendship so grand and enough for itself that it leaves no space for anything or anybody else. Except of course for Nihal, if she will have it.<br/><br/>Minor quibbles are that for all its words the book stays a bit on the surface when it comes to emotions, doesn't deliver any raunchiness (which in this day and age should be no issue) and draws exclusively from a typically Turkish lyrical style which—well written and <I>beautiful</I>—is somewhat too familiar.<br/><br/>Now I'm definitely curious to see <a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/our-grand-despair/">the movie</a>.