The Man Who Forgot His Name

“There was a vagabond flare in the sky; on my right was Ali, who kept scratching his shoulder on and on, and on my left the cold of the night. Tarýk!.. I remember; he was lying facedown a few meters away, peeping at the soldiers running about at the foot of the hill, uttering screams in Hebrew…”

The Spanish Civil War, which gathered anti-fascists, democrats, socialists and communists from all around the world into the Republican lines between 1935 and 1938, is regarded as the last romantic war. Fighting in Palestine meant exactly the same thing for the 1968 generation. It wouldn’t be wrong to call Palestine, the Spain of the 1968 generation. With his fourth novel, The Man Who Forgot His Name, Mehmet Erođlu tells us the story of a man who had forced to forget his name to hide his identity when he got caught in 1969, on a hill besieged by Israeli soldiers between the Dead Sea and River Jordan, and how he finds out his name eighteen years later with accompany of a curly-haired brunette girl they had fantasized about on that night, on that hill while trying to cope with the dangers stand on the hill. Mehmet Erođlu gives all this in a fantastic editing we can’t see the samples of in the Turkish novel. Tarýk, who is stuck on top of a hill flares pour onto, Ali, and the third guy who sacrifices himself for the sake of his friends’ lives, and whom we ever will learn the name of… The Man Who Forgot His Name, dedicated to those who do not forget the ideals they believe in, and although is the story of what happened to the main character who is after the mystery hidden in his name on the night of November 17^th, 1969, it is also a lyrical lament wailed for a generation that didn’t hesitate to follow the adventure of mankind being hundreds of kilometers away from their countries “to own a life worth living, to be buried in the sun.”

The Man Who Forgot His Name, Mehmet Erođlu’s shortest yet heartiest novel, is also his last book during the period of 1965-1980 which makes use of the ‘young man’ figure as the protagonist of the novel. With this novel, Erođlu reveals one by one who were dreaming of being saviors the distinctive character traits of a romantic generation that deeply influenced the destiny of the country with their activities – and walked close to death seeking a revolution that was not treated to them. Ali who risked being shot in order not to step on planted things, a young man who cannot bear being 1/33 when released from the prison together with 33 people in return for the body of an Israeli pilot…

The editing of the novel is as striking as its theme and subject. The protagonist, who says he has forgotten his name and suggests going on a journey together to ‘curly-haired brunettes with mini skirts’ at the parties he hosts every summer for the last fourteen years, at last takes his way with a girl that accepts to go with him to eighteen years before, to the night of November 17^th, 1969, to seek the secret hidden at the end of that night. The events progress without following a certain order in a period of eighteen years, bouncing back and forth over concepts, momentary situations and emotions. At the end of the story, the real identities of both the man who forgot his name, and Petra – the curly-haired brunette imaginary girl Ali made up on 17^th November 1969 – are revealed; and so is the secret that has been causing the man who forgot his name to suffer deeply for years with shame and regret because he didn’t die that night.

Although the novel begins with a narration about three young men, the fourth character in the background is death and ends this dramatic story in its kingdom.