Fatma Aydemir
Djinns

A powerful tale of migration and family, Fatma Aydemir’s structurally complex Djinns weaves together several voices to create a rich narrative tapestry – a novel that will hold appeal for fans of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

Hüseyin Yilmaz is dead. The man who left Turkey in 1971 in search of a new life in Germany, who raised four children and worked every possible shift in order to save for an apartment in Istanbul, has died in the entrance to his new home, on the threshold of a life that was yet to come. The opening chapter of Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns is lyrical and brutal, an introduction to a character who is instantly snatched away, the creation of a loss, an emptying of the stage that forms the heart of this extraordinary novel. Compelling from the outset, profoundly thought and people-driven, Djinns will appeal to admirers of books such as Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

An overnight sensation in Germany, where it was published in 2022, Djinns is the second novel by journalist and author Fatma Aydemir and now comes to us in a brilliant translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi. Almost dizzying in scope and yet narrated at an intimate level, Djinns displays Aydemir’s craftsmanship as a novelist. From the focal point of one family’s bereavement, she broadens her brushstrokes to paint a vivid and often painful picture of life in contemporary Germany for migrants and their children – principally of the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora, but with themes that transcend borders and cultures.

In the wake of Hüseyin’s death, his family converge on the apartment in Istanbul, a place where none of them has ever been and yet which has come to embody their father and his dying hopes. There is Sevda, his estranged eldest daughter, named for another child who died before she was born. Peri, the rebel of the family, bold and uncompromising yet aching with a secret loss. Hakan, the oldest son, who drives to Istanbul across Europe in much the same way he moves through life – too fast, trapped in his thoughts, railing against myriad daily injustices. Ümit, fifteen years old, in love with his best friend and punished for his sexuality by the very people entrusted with his care. And finally Emine, Hüseyin’s widow, keeper of secrets and silence, sentry to the other great loss that we gradually learn underpins the novel.

Aydemir chooses to present Hüseyin and Emine in second-person narratives that bookend the novel, while each child receives their own third-person section in between. These four chapters make up the bulk of the story, describing not only events after Hüseyin’s death but also the lives of the family until then, their complex relationships and the different paths they have taken. Despite the third-person perspective, each character’s voice is unique, and the effect of this multiplicity is not only an intricate narrative tapestry, but also to approach Hüseyin and Emine from a distance, to allow the reader to view both characters and the past through the lens of an ever-shifting present. Overlaid perspectives are mirrored in overlapping events, threads of plot that sometimes disappear only to resurface later. To weave a novel of such thematic and technical richness requires great skill, but Aydemir does so with a lightness of touch that ensures Djinns is constantly, almost astonishingly, readable.

It’s easy to describe a novel as ‘important’, particularly one that contributes so fundamentally to the growing canon of what is often deemed ‘postmigration’ literature. To reduce Djinns to this word would be, however, to do Aydemir a disservice. This novel is important, but for a reader of fiction it is also a joy: extremely fine storytelling centred on a well-paced plot, vividly drawn characters and a clear yet poetic use of language. In English, of course, this last is rendered beautifully by Jon Cho-Polizzi, whose decision to maintain the non-italicized Turkish words of the original adds an essential layer of translation both literal and metaphorical. In a novel about silence – within families and society – Aydemir shows incontrovertibly that words really do matter.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eleanor Updegraff is a committed bookworm with a particular penchant for literature in translation. She makes her living from words in all forms: as a ghostwriter, translator of German, copy-editor and book reviewer, and author of short stories and creative non-fiction. After nine years in Austria, she now lives in Hampshire, where she can usually be found walking the Downs or browsing a local bookshop.

The article was first published in the dossier Book Blog: Literary Tastings by Goethe-Institut Glasgow.