MANTUA. For the series Meetings with authors at the Mantua Literature Festival, the Turkish writer who is looking for an alternative to habit.
Name
Hakan Gunday
Who is
Born in Rhodes in 1976, he has Turkish blood and a European gaze. Son of diplomats, he grew up moving from one city to another, and then landed in Istanbul, where he now lives. Nine novels bridge between East and West.
Particular signs
A fetish bond assigned to each protagonist. A frog, a cello, a contact that keeps them safe. For him, this role is played by books.
Write why
«I was 23 years old and I had enrolled in political science. To escape real life I started writing. Writing equals thinking, it’s the best way to do it. It has become a romantic gesture».
Read if
You want to heal from attacks of cynicism with a load of bad thoughts so powerful as to push you to search for an alternative. Pronoun (Marcos y Marcos) is the story of a human being who wonders how to achieve peace. Zamir starts out as a victim, a bomb ruined his face, he starts working on a foundation moved by the noblest ideals, then he realizes that everything is governed by economic interests and decides to use the same scheme. “War continues in the absence of an interest in finding peace. We never talk about the value of human life. Zamir understands this and looks for another way, he is convinced that everything is permissible, but if a person wants to absorb the trauma instead of overcoming it, he becomes his own trauma. Zamir instigates peace in the most subtle ways, there is no difference between his desire for good and the drive of those seeking war: it’s like a dead end road».
The key to the book given by the author
“Maybe Zamir can find a way if he finds his original motivation. If there is something worse than violence it is the habit of violence and we experience it every day. Habit leads to acceptance and one becomes indifferent. Before starting to write, I ask myself a question and then look for the best way to answer. For Pronoun the question was: How does one arrive at peace?».
About Türkiye where he lives
«Erdogan is a populist character who moves and uses whatever is needed: peace, war, migrations… populist figures are willing to exploit everything. In Turkey they have already done so on the subject of migration, they have obtained advantages from an agreement with the European Union. And with the war in Ukraine and the talks with Putin, the pattern is always the same».
Maybe not everyone knows that
Gunday wrote the script for a Netflix TV series, “The Uysall Family” where in the fog of Istanbul a frustrated architect finds an outlet in a punk life while his wife tries to rejuvenate and the children don’t seem to want to face their problems. “We could say that the series is proof of the impact of politics on the family. It is not only the family that is dysfunctional, it is society that produces this family. Society pushes people to be different in order to be recognised, so we split up and lose authenticity, the freedom to show ourselves for who we are”.
He wrote a book if
There is a child who wonders why. «I am a capital, the little ones want to know the reason for things, they are obsessive, the big ones lose this ability. They take the worst situations for granted. My books are an investigation into what happens in between, to understand when we stop asking ourselves questions».