Which of the objects you have described have particular significance? Did you use objects to convey particular details about Turkey that are part of the subterranean atmosphere of the book but are not immediately apparent?
Yes. Take the example of the quince grater. I was writing about the 1980 coup in Turkey and although it does not directly affect the lives of my characters, it is certainly there in the background. The question was how to express this repression, this feeling of oppression, which even the upper class bourgeoisie feels when faced with the brutality of the army. I found I could convey that through this object, an ordinary household quince grater.
from here.
I see that in the Museum you have the invitation card for Kemal and Fusun's engagement party or the letters from Kemal's company Sat Sat or the bottles of Meltem fruit drinks. Did you have these objects specially made?
Of course. And we specially printed movie tickets, restaurant menus but we also found other restaurant menus of that era and we mean to continue to collect and archive this kind of ephemera. We used a lot of what Marcel Duchamp called “readymades”. Something that was really used in the quotidian and which in the book you can identify with one or other character. There were times like some brands or objects, which the novel mentions and which actually do not exist.
In order to produce them I went to artists and worked with them. Meltem soda, for instance, did not exist. But other fruit sodas did. In 1966 Coca-Cola entered the Turkish market and this also produced a series of Turkish-made sodas and I remember in those days most of the advertising for such products was done by European models. Now of course almost 90 per cent of the advertising uses Turkish models.
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i did like Kemal being associated to Rear Window and Füsun to To catch a Thieve. e para terminar, um pouco da voz silenciosa de Füsun:
The mystery of Fusun is in her silence. In the end the book asks the question: was it a suicide or an accident? Or was it that she had no talent for driving and it was just a car accident or did the accident happen because she wanted to be in films and was imitating Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” and stuck her elbow too far out of the window? So, for me, Fusun is a means to see our whole culture. Her inner life, her anger, her silence is important for me.
This is also enhanced by my attempt to write about sophisticated way of communication between lovers — not through words but through looks, through gestures, through signs and symbols and it was hard for me to do that.
The atmosphere of the book is not that of lovers negotiating their love in a democratic way. It is the more powerful Kemal, her family and her husband on one side who are curtailing that dialogue while towards the end of the book she herself begins to emerge.
Fusun's anger is due to the fact that she can never confront the man who very subtly in a manipulative manner has suppressed her. He promises her things and then those things are not realised. He wants her to be famous but then he is afraid of what happens if she becomes too famous.
On the other hand her way to success also can be only through the energy and success of that man.
(my bold, sim)
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Tarif Ara's quince grater (Ayva rendesi.) to make Ayva Reçeli, doce de marmelo.
e as primeiras flores de marmeleiro.
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