Like any grand act of destructive passion, it is both agonising and riveting to read, not only for the shattering impact on the three principal lives, but also for the way their drama ripples out through the lives of their families and friends. The long party scene, set at the Istanbul Hilton, is a tour de force a controlled detonation of explosive emotional materials that have been expertly laid and primed during the foregoing chapters. Kemal, at this point merely a charming egotist, believes he can have his cake and eat it, even going so far as to persuade Fusun to attend his engagement party. Before long Fusun, too, has "deliberately elected to give her virginity" to Kemal (the deflowering is ominously juxtaposed with images of the Feast of the Sacrifice, with lambs being butchered on every corner of Istanbul), and she vows never to sleep with another man. But as the engagement party approaches, Kemal runs into his sweet, 18-year-old, declassée cousin, Fusun, working in a boutique, and the two become rapidly, catastrophically, infatuated with each other. Daringly, she has already – as Kemal puts it – "given me her virginity", though only because she trusts in his honour as her betrothed. Kemal is happily engaged to Sibel, a suitable woman from his own class. The first part reads like a classic tale of reckless passion colliding with bourgeois convention.
I doubt whether the subject of a woman's virginity has been so firmly at the forefront of a significant novel since Richardson's Clarissa. Adding to the fraughtness (and disquieting pleasure) of the endeavour is its setting in a society – upper-class Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s – poised uncomfortably between modern and traditional attitudes to love and sex, with eros half out of his cage, but honour and shame still coordinating the perception of private conduct.
0 kommentar(er)
