As Turkey approaches its 100th year, our correspondent selects five books that explain the country
crave a measure of calm. Not so Turkey. The country, which celebrates its 100th birthday next year, has learned to live on the edge. Inflation, largely the result of a reality-defying monetary policy imposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has topped 80%. The currency is imploding. Social problems, fuelled by a growing gap between rich and poor and the recent influx of nearly 4m Syrian refugees, are on the rise.
More than eight decades after his death, Kemal Ataturk’s legacy towers over Turkey. The hero of the country’s independence war and founder of the Turkish republic was a visionary reformer. He abolished the Islamic caliphate and sharia courts, overhauled the Turkish language, traded the Arabic script for the Latin one and backed women’s suffrage. Women in Turkey gained the right to vote in 1934, a decade before their peers in France.
With only a few exceptions, including his most recent creation, “Nights of Plague”, which will be published in English this autumn, Orhan Pamuk tends to situate his novels in Istanbul. Yet his portrayals of his hometown, choked with traffic, boiling with energy, ravaged by generations of developers but still spectacularly beautiful, are sometimes unsatisfying.
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