In the name of the awaited word: Bülent Akyürek's "Man for Sale" and "Forward Backwards"

"Human beings lose the present by fixating on the one thing that does not concern them, namely the future; and when the years pass and fly about like yellow leaves, this time, instead of living the present, they again flee from themselves by thinking about the past, because the span of time called the present will be bestowed only in Paradise. Paradise is the most infinite present within infinity. Satan, with his hairy fingers and long dirty nails, deceived Adam, peace be upon him, by showing him a step ahead, the future. Now all of us are searching for the present we have lost, while Satan laughs behind our backs...

Our soul, like a dog, buries our bones in the earth and goes away. The soul goes because the jeweler knows the value of gold. Had the body had any value, we would not have abandoned it to the world and gone. When the soul departs, our body turns into manure; our great intellect, our inventive brain, our magnificent hands that produce our works become food for either insects or plants. Those who are aware of this cycle try to invest their lives with meaning. There is only one way to defeat death while alive: to die while living! Perhaps only when we manage to feed not our body, which will become fertilizer for the soil, but our soul, which will carry us to the Paradise of the hereafter, can the world turn into a bearable, beautiful dungeon."

After a silence of 14 years, Bülent Akyürek has made a bomb-like return with two exceptional works that, without exaggeration, will bring a brand-new breath to our literary world and may be regarded as revolutionary.

If we say 14 years of silence, it is because we did not hear his voice. For we understand from the two works he has produced that in his world, far from us, he never stopped, never fell silent; he spoke, thought, felt, lived, and committed to writing what he saw, heard and comprehended. He did not live what he lived only for himself, did not keep what he saw to himself, did not merely watch and observe himself; he also observed the world we live in and put it into words in his own distinctive way.

"Satılık Adam" (Man for Sale) is a novel, and "Geriye Doğru İleri" (Forward Backwards) is a book of essays in his own style, but both have the flavor of poetry, in his own distinctive style. Literary genres have their own rules and formats, but those who produce path-breaking works open their own paths to the extent that they can transcend these rules and put forth their own rules and their own marvelous styles, and their labor stands out as a work.

We had felt this difference before in all the works Gökhan Özcan has produced, starting with his Hiçbişey. He too drew attention with his own distinctive call to see what needs to be seen in the world we all look at, and he continues to do so. His languages are like a dwelling in which the reality we live in, our unhinged, scattered world, is gathered together and finds meaning.

"…(B)ecause life grows ever more meaningless, when one day it loses its reality, the most real things that are lived turn into epics, are clothed in literature, and thus little people are freed of their burdens," says Bülent Akyürek. He names, in his own language, the meaninglessness in which modern man is increasingly drowning. Was this not the motivation that first brought the novel into being? The epic form of an age in which God has fallen silent, values are shattered, and the world is no longer meaningful in itself. Yet modern man did not find the lost meaning in the novel either. The hero of the novel appeared not as an epic hero living in harmony with the world, but as a problematic subject who searches for meaning, errs, and often fails. But the novel, too, did not stay within the format first expected of it. It multiplied, diversified, and different examples emerged according to the personal genius of the novelist. Each opened its own path and said its own word.

I have known Bülent Akyürek since the day he wrote his first novel, perhaps even before he published it. He is from Elazığ, but as of his first novel "he always addressed the nation from Ankara." In his words, all the tensions of being from Ankara, the human diversity, the experience, and yet the most effective resistance against Ankara's enlightenmentism, modernism, superiority and bureaucratic arrogance, are expressed with the most poetic irony.

Even just the titles of the books he wrote before his 14 years of seclusion show very strikingly the kind of struggle in which his pen was sharpened: Öğlen Namazına Nasıl Kalkılır (How to Get Up for the Noon Prayer); Mavi Marmara Risalesi (The Mavi Marmara Treatise); Güzel ve Etkili Susma Sanatı (The Art of Beautiful and Effective Silence); Felsefeden Acil Çıkış (Emergency Exit from Philosophy); Çöldeki Penguen (The Penguin in the Desert); Cinnetim Cennetimdir (My Madness Is My Paradise); İtin Biri (Some Cur); Yağmur Getiren Fırtına (The Storm That Brings Rain); Zamanın Efendisi (Master of Time); Kurumuş Ağaçlara Fısıldayan Çocuk (The Child Who Whispered to Withered Trees); Kışın Uyumak İstemeyen Ayı Yavrusu (The Bear Cub Who Did Not Want to Sleep in Winter).

Against the "self-development" discourses of our age, which constantly motivate people to become leaders, to be successful, to take a larger share of the national income than everyone else, to get ahead of everyone, and thus incite and encourage them to see everyone as insects, to crush and ignore them, he wrote a "Book of Personal Regression" and said "say 'enough!' to the ox inside you." The book was the most artful way of standing before a world that had lost itself and saying "stop, crowds, this is a dead end!"

Evidently there is no room left to describe Satılık Adam, but before there was any chance to read and digest it, Bülent Akyürek came with his book "Geriye Doğru İleri." Going a step further than his novel, it is another book, another work, written during his time of seclusion.

I say this of both works without any exaggeration: the most effective, most direct, most authentic literature I have read in recent years. It names things, brings words exactly to their object and speech to its truth, and makes one witness to the truth. Bülent Akyürek has a special faculty given to him for naming and for putting into words.

For years he had been busy watching the world as a silent sage; we had missed him. With his two books he has turned up like "the awaited man," and I am not exaggerating at all, he is opening a new lane for himself. Once you begin reading you cannot put it down; the language draws you into its own flow anyway.

Like the famous German poet Hölderlin, when he finds his Heideggers, he offers a source that will inspire many powerful philosophies. I already greet him with all my admiration.

In our time, when the word has lost its value, when literature has become an industrial product, mass-produced and consumed and corresponding to no truth, two works that have risen like the sun over our literary world: I do not normally recommend the same books to everyone, but as an exception I recommend them to everyone.