Reşat Nuri Güntekin

Pity                                 

Original Title : Acımak

Novel

 

Zehra is well known as a teacher in the town where she lives.  Deputy Head Halil visiting an old school friend, Director of Education Tevfik Hayri, asks him as a favour to a friend that Zehra be given a ten to fifteen day break. It's because her father in Istanbul is sick and old and she needs to see him. But it so happens that Zehra doesn't want to go saying she no longer has a father.

Two days after this event the Director of Education receives a telegram saying that Zehra's father, Mürşit Efendi, is on the verge of dying.  The director informs Zehra who decides she has  to go to Istanbul. During the journey Zehra reflects on what her father has done to the family, how having murdered her mother, elder sister and grandmother, he had placed her in a boarding school and forgotten all about her. She arrives in Istanbul. Her father has just died. At his bed side there were quite a few women.  She had no desire to get any closer.  An old neighbour,  Vehbi Bey, gives Zehra the key to a chest containing her father's possessions. At first she is reluctant to take the key but then opens the chest with high anticipation. Apart from his possessions, there is a diary. She begins to read it.  She reads of her father's first years working as a clerk, about his marriage to her mother and what her grandmother had done. The more she read the more she understood that everything had been the complete opposite of what she had thought. In fact her mother and grandmother had been to blame for everything. A sense of pity and love for her father is born.  She runs to kiss her father's face. Returning to the school a few days later, she begins to understand how it feels to pity.  A short while later she marries.

 

 

Selected Reviews:

 

All Reşat Nuri's novels criticise the bureaucracy from the top to the bottom. Published in 1928, the novel 'Pity' marks the point where he has given up hope. From the moment he qualifies as a civil servant and takes an oath to faithfully serve the people and nation, the novel's hero  Mürşit begins to slowly realise that, turning the wheels of  bureaucracy, he would never be able to serve the nation and its people. Fethi Naci, Cumhuriyet Kitap

 

Reşat Nuri expresses his understanding of the questions facing society and the individual through the novel 'Pity's' most qualified character, the Director of Education  Tevfik Bey who uses the following words to define the pre-requisite of a happy society, “To pity means to listen to the cries and moans.” What's clear is this. In general Güntekin was a writer who tried to listen to the cries and moans of the middle classes. Ahmet Oktay, Literature of the Founding of the Republic Era, Kültür Bakanlığı Ya.

 

Perhaps the most important sentence of the novel 'Pity' is the following: “In my opinion, a mono-truth obsession and an ability to concentrate on rights and facts is not enough to keep society happy.  For this reason hard work is necessary.”  The novels of Reşat Nuri are a bit idealistic with idealistic characters. Muzaffer Uyguner, Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Bilgi Yayınevi

 

This book 'Pity' introduces us to the emotion of pity in a beautiful manner. The part of the novel that most affected me was when Zehra reads in a diary that her father was innocent and kisses his body.  I think there is nothing missing from the novel and nothing exaggerated. A wonderful book. I recommend everybody to read it. Yağmur Ekim Yılmaz (12 years old, Kırklareli), Cumhuriyet kitap

 

Greetings to everyone. It's the series that perhaps influenced me more than any other and takes first place. I've been looking for this series for years. He who searches finds: I found it after four years. Seyda