Literary Fiction Review

A Mind at Peace is a movingly haunting symphony. Set to a backdrop of age-old Ottoman music and verse, it is the story of a country’s struggle to hold onto meaning and philosophic insight gained from centuries of traditions and customs while careening toward the comfort of wealth through acceptance of modern Western economic culture. In just three generations, Turkish peasants were expected to complete this process of acculturation.

“The past is always nipping at our heels. A surplus of half-dead worldviews lie in wait to interfere in modern life. On the other hand our engagement with the modern and the West amounts to emptying into that gushing river as an afterthought. Meanwhile, we’re not simply water, we’re human society, and we’re not a tributary joining a river, we’re appropriating a civilization along with its culture, within which we must possess a particular identity.”

Mümtaz, the main character, when orphaned as a child, is sent to live within the family of his paternal cousin, Îhsan, an intellectual, a teacher and a philosopher.  Îhsan would become like a brother to Mümtaz, and also his mentor. Îhsan’s students, Mümtaz among them, challenge his beliefs with the idealism of youth, but Îhsan is up to the challenge of leading them forward with the knowledge that the intellectuals will point the way toward Turkey’s destiny.

Mümtaz is tortured by the tragedies of his childhood, but also by memories of Nuran. We learn early on that their love affair has ended, but then throughout the second movement of Tanpinar’s beautiful symphony we are led on their journey through the Bosphorus strait. The Bosphorus itself seems a metaphor for the struggles pitting the Black Sea and the Orient to the east against the Mediterranean’s modern cultures to the west. As Mümtaz and Nuran travel back and forth by ferry and rowboat, standing in the way of a life together is the constant conflict of the two ways of life. Other than by Îhsan and his family, their match is not seen as perfect. Nuran is older than Mümtaz, is divorced and has a daughter seven years of age.

As it was in many other works throughout his life, for Tanpinar, the concept of time and its effect on humanity is a prominent theme. Life, death and the passage between are an abstraction only evident to humans.

“Only for mankind does time, monolithic and absolute, divide in two; and because time, this dim lantern, this sooty radiance, struggles to burn within us, because it introduces a complex calculus into the simplest things, because we measure its passing by our shadows on the ground, it divides life and death, and like a clock’s pendulum, our consciousness swings between the two polarities of our own creation. Humanity, this prisoner of time, is but desperate, trying to escape to the outside. Instead of losing itself in time, instead of flowing along with all else in a broad and continental river-run, humanity tries to perceive time externally. Thus time becomes a mechanism of torment. One lunge and we’re at the pole of death, everything’s over. Since we’ve split the unity of whole numbers, since we’ve consented to being fractions, we should resign ourselves to fragmentation. Momentum, however, sweeps us to the other pole; we’re in the midst of life, we’re full of vitality, we’re once again the plaything of our hurtling inertia; but yet again, by its very nature, the balance tips irrefutably toward death, and torments increase exponentially.”

Tanpinar gently melds the two lovers to the seasons. The relationship is born of the spring, flourishes during the summer, begins to wain in the autumn and is snuffed in winter. Time passes, yet does it exist?

Mümtaz claims not to fear death; he claims to seek satisfaction rather than greatness. Yet he also feels humans are creatures of anxiety and fear. At moments of bliss, he finds himself “lanced by dread.” He fears the balance could suddenly tip. Nuran’s family’s deep roots to the past and Ottoman music is attractive to Mümtaz, yet Nuran is tiring of it and would like to move forward.
The final movement of Tanpinar’s symphony finds Mümtaz without Nuran and searching for inner peace and a consciousness of continuity.

Struggles abound in A Mind at Peace. Yet it seems that every page causes one to stop and think as insights into human nature are thrust forward.

“Every act, regardless of type, is a result of despair. Particularly in the period of open fear that won’t scab over . . . One by one, our continual rejection of cherished things. The fear of turning into one’s father. And, finally, the realization that whatever one does, death is inescapable.”

“How did life manage to thrive between two polarities? At one extent, an array of vehicles for mankind’s exaltation and, at the other, trifling worries, the settling of scores, and random enmities that strove to exclude and banish people from exalted heights.”

Regarding Ottoman music: “Whether we like it or not, we belong to it. We admire our traditional music and for better or worse it speaks to us. For better or worse we hold this key that unlocks the past for us . . . The past relinquishes its epochs to us one after another and dresses us in its labels.”

The translation from the Turkish is by award winning translator Erdağ Göknar and is, for the most part, lyrically gorgeous

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, who died in 1962, wrote A Mind at Peace in 1949. It has taken nearly 60 years for an English translation to be released. I for one believe it presents a beautifully melodic picture of Istanbul and the Bosphorus during a crossroad of Turkish and world history. We shouldn’t have had to wait this long for such an important work.