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The Belated Dead
The Belated Dead is the story of how-after four years- Ayhan-
the protagonist of Mehmet Eroðlu’s first novel The Middle of Desolation- pursues his friend Zafer who disappeared
in 1971, just before the 1st Nationalist Front (semi fascist) Government
was founded; and with this theme, it resembles sequence to the first novel. This
pursuit which expands as far as Ankara, Gaziantep, Syria
and Antakya – and in fact will too also
determine Ayhan’s destiny – ends in Ýskenderun. The novel is the parade of the
15 days that Ayhan recalls in a hotel room in Ýskenderun through flashbacks,
while he resists to get on the freighter waiting at the port to take him abroad
on the night of April 19th.
The Belated Dead in a way begins with the last lines of the novel, right
before the decision Ayhan is about to give – towards the morning - , and after
a few tense hours, it comes together with the same lines again. However, Mehmet
Eroðlu accomplishes to fit -with skilful flashbacks- into this short period both
the two weeks Ayhan spent in Antakya and
Ýskenderun investigating the secrets behind the mysterious disappearance of
Zafer, and his course of coming to a conclusion about his own destiny.
Two things draw attention right away about The Belated Dead: Its
striking ending on Mount Nemrut’s summit which is defined as the meeting point
of the East and the West, and Ýskenderun, which is recreated in a way that
reminds us of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria.
Mehmet Eroðlu has achieved to place the story of Ýskenderun – different from
all other cities with its history and ethnic, cultural and religious texture -
starting from the French military occupation period (1917) extending as far as
its transformation to a cosmopolitan commercial center on the verge of
industrialization as an exotic background to Ayhan’s chase of his destiny,
which turned into an adventure. Beatrice, the Italian woman who ran away from
her sexual preference she couldn’t confess, left Africa and went after a black
American working at the Ceyhan pipeline construction; Fuad, the representative
of the large family whom roots going back to Beirut, who is trying to keep the
tribal bonds broken by developing capitalism together, and whom Zafer stayed
with in Ýskenderun; B-girl Gül whose only concern is to find a man to take her
away from the cheap night club she’s working at, to avoid ending up in a brothel;
Bahar and Lale Ozan; beautiful women Fuad makes use of for his own interests;
the Arabian-originated princess Zeynep who has lost her crown; and Blind Abdul
and terrifying Sait coming from the gloomy past of the lustful city are some of
the interesting and odd characters Ayhan encounters in this exotic port-city.
In The Belated Dead, Mehmet
Eroðlu not only skillfully tells about an abstract life addicted to death which
turns out to be an adventure of madness and which Ayhan pursues solely by his
mind, on the other hand discusses three different types of activist behaviors,
the dilemma of the East and the West, and the concepts of abstractness, concreteness
and suicide through characters that become more evident through the stereotypes
Ayhan, Zafer, Halit and Fuad.
The Belated Dead won the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and
the Madaralý Novel Award in 1985.
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