Among the Turkish authors translated throughout the world, we especially know Orhan Pamuk and Ahmet Altan. Hakan Günday is part of the new generation of Turkish writers worth reading, born 25 years later and raised in the midst of the social and geopolitical upheavals that have affected this region of the world wedged between Europe and Asia.
An author who draws on the fiery context of the region to nourish his work, which we discovered with the moving Againabout a family of illegal migrant smugglers, awarded the prestigious Medici Foreign Prize in 2015.
Zamir is his fifth novel translated into French. The character who gave his first name to the title has just been born when he is abandoned by his mother in a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border. Abandoned in the hope that the impossible dreams of this teenager, born in the poorest village in Turkey and forced into marriage, will one day come true for her child. But an explosion disfigures the baby, who survives against all odds.
The novel alternates between Zamir’s childhood, raised by the charity that runs the refugee camp and shamelessly makes him the face of its fundraising campaigns, and the adult he has become – a seller of peace that travels the world to try to convince top leaders and the worst dictators to avoid war at all costs.
From the outset, you should know that Zamir is a demanding novel. Firstly because it demands our full attention by making us travel at the speed of light from one corner of the planet to another, multiplying the political and historical references.
It is an oppressive novel, also, because of the heaviness of the subject and the horrors it tells. “Because in this world everything was possible,” writes Hakan Günday.
As in Again, the writer does not seek to spare anyone’s sensitivities. The novel is set in the indefinite future, but everything it says has happened in one way or another – or could happen. The resurgence of far-right nationalism. The despicable acts committed by soldiers during armed conflicts. Or the horrible machinations orchestrated by organizations with the sole aim of raising funds.
Zamir is both a vitriolic criticism of charitable organizations – whose hypocrisy and corruption he denounces – and a diatribe against international diplomacy; because to succeed in putting aside the warlike desires of the most influential leaders in the world, the protagonist must submit to the same villainies. It is a tough novel that forces us to think with impressive mastery about what our world would be like if, as the author writes, Cain had not killed Abel and that man was not, deep down, , a child who only trusts those who are like him.
Zamir
Gallimard
432 pages