Meltem Arıkan

 

Tempest Of The Yearning

Original Title: Özlemin Beni Savuran

 

Novel

 

One of the new stars of modern Turkish Literature, Meltem Arikan explains in her latest novel ‘Tempest Of The Yearning’ how even when women are able to find love, because of feelings of guilt inherited from their mothers and grandmothers, fear transforms their happiness into unhappiness. 

 

One of the women who experience this fear is the heroine of the novel, Deflin. Deflin loves Yunus… She is in love but there is a fear of being deserted. For this reason she escapes from herself and reality.  Thus, ‘Tempest Of The Yearning’ is turned into the sad saga of Deflin and Yunus.  Does this story end with Delfi’s escape, her belief that if she escapes she’ll find happiness, and Yunus refusing to accept her escapes?

 

Selected reviews

 

In this case the writer explains lives that hover between freedom and love.  ‘Tempest Of The Yearning’ is a novel of warning about feelings of guilt that steer women and undermines them.  Doğan Hızlan, Hürriyet Gazetesi, Seyahat Eki

 

The direction of the journey that Meltem Arikan sets out on in her novel ‘Tempest Of The Yearning’ doesn’t lead to surrender. In this instance the writer is bathing in the waters of what doesn’t happen, what cannot happen and when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. The plot of ‘Tempest Of The Yearning’ circles the fringes of the genre as well as the novel and seeps into the soul of the heroine. It’s a reckoning full of associations between the narrowing of the past, the present and the future!  She is always thoughtful and always turning to the past.  Maybe the heroine is writing the poem of her existence, a long poem hiding the lines within the phrases, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. Gökçe Mine Olgun, Radikal Gazetesi

 

- Oğuz: Your novels are always pessimistic.  Don’t you ever think of writing something that will make readers feel good?

 

Meltem Arıkan: I write more about facts, things that we don’t like to see, subjects that we avoid talking about, that we try to cover up.  I have a problem when it comes to women’s existences. If women didn’t exist as women, you men couldn’t exist at all. My biggest dream is a world where men and women exercise their natural sexual identities, accepting their differences and thus appreciate the richness and harmony between these differences and enjoy all the true aspects of their lives.  Maybe if there was such a world I would be able to write a novel that made people feel good. Kürşad Oğuz, Newsweek Türkiye Dergisi

 

Meltem Arikan in her previous novel wrote about women destroying themselves in the throes of a love affair; who to make their men happy live his life and always end up disappointed…  who to make him happy value him more than he deserves and thus diminish themselves, and while they try to be what he wants them to be they destroy themselves… Women who are afraid to be women. In this novel she tells of how even when women are able to find love, because of feelings of guilt inherited from their mothers and grandmothers, fear transforms their happiness into unhappiness.  The fear of being deserted and escaping from the facts and themselves…Becoming lost within doubts. www.haberturk.com