The writer's fate of the Turkish author Zulfyu Livaneli in Russia is somehow strange: at one time Livaneli visited the USSR, personally knew and was on friendly terms with Mikhail Gorbachev, but the first translation of his books into Russian took place in 2018.
Why the author of Turkish bestsellers suddenly interested our publishers right now is a mystery to me, there seems to be no great demand for Turkish prose, the same Orhan Pamuk remains a more modest writer for connoisseurs and connoisseurs than a pop figure from literature, and the fashion for the style in which Livaneli works has collapsed along with the fashion for Coelho novels.
"The Story of My Brother" is not yet an old novel, so to speak, not established, it was published in Turkey in 2013, at that time Livaneli had more than a dozen books written.
If you try to explain in a nutshell what kind of text it is, you will have to resort to recreating a strange hybrid: imagine that an elderly Turk was inspired by the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and decided to do something similar, only unlike Salman Rushdie with his "Two years, eight months and twenty-eight Nights", decided to abandon any of any unreal elements in his narrative.
An elderly engineer who moved from Istanbul to the coast tells a young journalist who came to investigate the death of a young girl stories about love, jealousy and murder, but the main story of these meetings becomes the tragic life story of his twin brother.
I admit, at the beginning, "The story of my brother" intrigued me immensely: here you have a hero with oddities, avoiding human touch and preferring books to people, with which his whole house is filled, and even with a thematic distribution by rooms, and a corpse, completely sudden, and an incomprehensible twin brother, either existing or not.
I read the first half with interest and figs that the hero, opening his mouth, gave out aphoristic statements from the category of "love is pain", then spoke with quotations from classics (thank you, though Livaneli did not rewrite them and did not appropriate them).
But as soon as Roman got close to the very story of his brother, which in this case is the central part of the narrative, I was bitterly disappointed: firstly, the story itself is petty, stupid and not particularly plausible, from the category of "this is how it happens in life", secondly, it is quite a whole and independent thing connected with the entire previous narrative, especially the murder of Ahmed's young neighbor, except thematically.
Something like: jealousy was probably the reason for the murder, and there is no jealousy without love, oh, I have a story of unhappy love here, now sit and listen to it for the next four days every evening.
Ahmed, Mehmed, a legless Afghan soldier, an angel-like Olga, Stolichnaya vodka, Chechen terrorists - I was counting on something more refined and metaphorical, mysterious and complex when I started reading My Brother's Story.
Alas, gradually the story, covered with an oriental flavor, turned into some kind of post-Soviet blackness with strange plot twists, as if invented by the scriptwriters of programs like "Military Secret". Thank you, although it was all easy to read, because Livaneli had already thrown out all his "smart thoughts" to the reader in the first half of the work.
Naturally, when I read, I built theories about both the killer and the twin brothers, tried to link all the storylines together so that something juicy and interesting would come out, but the author decided not to do all this, as a result, "My brother's story" all crumbles like an uncoated sand cake.
If initially I still wanted to look for some author's messages and meanings that do not lie on the surface (I had a theory that the book is generally about the impossibility of knowing life through reading fiction, which is only fiction, not a reflection of reality, and therefore no matter how much you read.
If you use literature as sand in which you hide your head, wisdom will not arrive), then the further Ahmed, Mehmed, Olga and translator Lyudmila moved into the forest, the less thoughts remained that Livaneli generally put some deep meanings into his brainchild, the feeling that he was just telling a story, the main purpose of which is to surprise and entertain the reader.
386.738 SRY