Adalet Ağaoğlu, one of the most prominent authors of modern Turkish literature, passed away at the age of 91 leaving behind a literary legacy that will be difficult to match for years to come. In the course of her long and productive life, she wrote numerous novels, essays, plays, memoirs, and short stories. Several generations of readers have been and continue to be charmed by her novels, where she portrayed, mostly through the personal stories of urban intellectuals, the cultural and political climate of Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century. The Narrow Times Trilogy stands out among these novels with its thematic richness and stylistic mastery signifying one of the highlights of the author’s prolific career.

Turkish readers cherish the first two novels of the trilogy –and for all the right reasons. Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die-1973) is a brilliant bildungsroman chronicling, with flashbacks into the post-war Ankara, a whole generation’s journey into adulthood under the expectant gaze of Atatürk, the country’s founding father. Aysel, the novel’s protagonist, is an educated woman who willingly partakes in the modern social life of the young Republic, but ends up feeling betrayed when she realizes that she has sacrificed her individuality for the ideals of the regime. Bir Düğün Gecesi (A Wedding Night-1979), on the other hand, is like an offbeat symphony with its multiple voices, recurrent motives, and gradually increasing tension. In this second novel, Ağaoğlu exhibits her mastery over language and style, devises a complicated structure, and most importantly, maintains a narration that moves from one consciousness to the next like a stone skipping on water. By layering various shots from the wedding, Ağaoğlu presents one long take of a carnival scene focusing on more than a dozen characters, whose viewpoints are revealed to the reader by numerous extended close-ups. Providing, among other things, a vivid depiction of social and political life in Turkey in the 1970s, Bir Düğün Gecesi is one of the masterpieces of the modern Turkish novel.

The final book of the trilogy is usually treated like a stepchild, possibly because it does not offer an easy read. In Hayır (No – 1987), Aysel is experiencing the challenges of old age, which she calls, quoting Camus’s L’Étranger, “the incurable disease.” The strong and independent protagonist of the trilogy has survived the pain of her broken marriage and the humiliation of being expelled from the university. She has been betrayed by her husband, who ran off with a younger woman, and by her colleagues, who abandoned her when she was imprisoned because of her political views. She is suffering from ill health, isolation, and more significantly, a loss of a sense of self. On the day when she will receive an achievement award, we watch her walking in a crowded city indifferent to her presence as she tries to make up her mind whether she should show up at the ceremony.

As the novel unfolds, the existential question that lies at the heart of Hayır becomes more discernible. The reference to Camus is not a coincidence. Aysel is alienated from her aging body and embarrassed because she is dying one day at a time: “One day you notice the yellowish color of your nails, the other day you see bags under your eyes… Piecemeal the body dies…” Yet what worries her most is not being able to maintain her dignity as a free thinker, as an independent spirit. Does old age mean that she will lose her uniqueness and hard-earned identity? While others regard death as the ultimate equalizer through which each individual is united with the infinite, Aysel views it as a leveling down or averageness that leaves no room for individual consciousness. “A life without God means a life without death. But what happens to our inner freedom?” she asks wondering whether her thinking self, the kernel of her individuality, would eventually disappear.

With this question Ağaoğlu returns to the central theme of all three novels: free will, which she regards not only as the basis of civil society but also as the essence of human nature. The autonomous person is an individual who acts out of free will and does not give in to the crowds. Recalling Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, Aysel ponders whether one can “go gentle into that good night.” She has constructed her whole life around a single but solid “No,” a response that is emblematic of her ability to dissent and protest. Will she now, after all has been said and done, “rage, rage against the dying of the light”? This is how the two axes of the novel overlap: While the protagonist strives to be the possessor of her own death, the author considers the possibility of narrating a timeless moment that would be immune to the constant flux of life. Hence, the narrative loses its linear structure and becomes a labyrinth of memories, fantasies, and desires, which relativize and blur the borders between reality and imagination, between past, present and future and between spaces here and there.

Like all moderns, Ağaoğlu is mainly concerned with the workings of narrative time. What marks the Narrow Times Trilogy is the employment of a subjective time that focuses on the multiple and permeable states of consciousness, which the author juxtaposes with the objective or clock time of material objects. All three novels take place within the duration of a couple of hours, which Ağaoğlu expands to an infinity of moments and possibilities by revealing the memories, hopes, and projections of the characters. This quality sets the text free from the boundaries of the linear and historical time of clocks and calendars while opening it to the unquantifiable and nonlinear temporality of human consciousness.

The duality between these two temporalities pervades Ağaoğlu’s work lending it a quality that challenges any absolute notion of reality that is unaffected by perception, memory, or anticipation. It also earns her a lasting and well-deserved place in the glorious novelistic tradition that emanated from modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

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