Turkish Immigration, Art and Narratives of Home in France

Literature of immigration as a literature of Europe

“…Her third novel, Quatre-vingt-dix-sept (2015), like the first one, takes place entirely in and around a single Turkish city, in this case Erzincan, but unlike that earlier novel, eventual emigration to France plays no part. Whereas the first two novels take place over the course of several decades beginning in 1938 (Schneider, 2016), this most recent novel is set in recent times, during the Gezi Park protests in the spring of 2013 -although stories from the past do play an important role in the present day of the novel. The Turkish setting for her first and third novels may contribute to the perception of her and her work as Turkish or between cultures, but the theme of diverse societies living together in the first two novels and the theme of opposition to oppression in the third are certainly not limited to one country.…”