“The time I spent in the RC library taught me 70% of what I know about literature.”
Prolific author Cem Akaş has a new novel out: Sözcüklerin Anlamı (The Meaning of Words, Can Yayınları). His latest work has garnered significant attention for its use of “interrupted realism,” a narrative technique that deliberately breaks the reader’s immersion in the story to highlight the distinction between objective truth and narrative constructs.
Akaş explains the draw of this method for him: “Every moment we live is punctured by what we hear, watch, and read in the media feed, and this has become our new ontology—this is how we live now. How can this condition of interruption be translated into the structure of a novel? Sözcüklerin Anlamı offers one possible answer to that question.”
Akaş views this novel as a shift in scale compared to his previous work: : “To put it in musical terms: the Olgunluk Çağı Üçlemesi (Age of Maturity Trilogy, Can Yayınları) 19 (19, Can Yayınları), and Y (Y, Can Yayınları) were my symphonies; Ofelya (Ophelia, Kafka Yayınevi) was a ballet; Zamanın En Kısa Hali (The Shortest State of Time, Can Yayınları) and Sözcüklerin Anlamı are chamber music pieces, each a quartet. “
Akaş remembers his time at RC fondly: “I had excellent teachers like John Heaney who encouraged me to write creatively; English classes taught me how to read a text and find things in it, which, by inference, taught me how to put things into texts. I never studied literature formally, but the time I spent in the RC library taught me 70% of what I know about literature.”
Cem Akaş is also known for writing Bir Geleceğin Anatomisi and Tepedeki Okul, as well as curating the RC’s 160th anniversary exhibition, both of which further deepened Akaş’s connection to RC: “I was enthralled with the history of the school, and the month I spent in New York, researching the RC archive at Columbia University, remains one of my favorite months in life.”
