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Email a friendDelightfully Turkish
DEAR Shameless Death is a wonderful if sometimes rather difficult read that tells the fascinating and occasionally brutal tale of a young girl growing up in modern-day Turkey.
Exploring both the pressures of an overbearing mother and the trauma that rapid urbanisation had on rural communities like her own, Tekin introduces myth and magic into the often hallucinatory narrative in a way that has inevitably invoked comparisons with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This is an obvious parallel, but the two writers have some very different concerns and the fact is that Tekin writes on her own terms and is firmly rooted in the experiences of Turkish society over the past few decades.
Indeed, the decision to employ magic was as much provoked by the military coup which effectively put a lid on more political discussions than by any concern for literary experimentation in and of itself. A classic of 20th century Turkish fiction.
STEVE ANDREW