A Useless Man

With all the wit and brilliance of Chekhov, a distinctive collection of lyrical stories from Sait Faik Abasıyanık, “Turkey’s greatest short story writer” (The Guardian)
 
Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.

Sait Faik's career marked a fascinating moment in Turkish culture in the 1930s and 40s when the secular, post-Ottoman sensibility placed new demands on the writing of literature. Turkish critics and readers regard him as their finest short story writer, a Turkish Chekhov. While Sait Faik was a talented poet, he preferred the mode of fiction, and his intuitive sense for poetry pervades his stories. Like Chekhov, Sait Faik's characters come to life on the page--we meet Armenian fishermen, Greek Orthodox priests, and the disillusioned and disenfranchised, their complicated emotions, thoughts, and conditions, without ever compromising the full range of their humanity.

About the Translators:

Alex Dawe has co-translated with Maureen Freely Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute, for which he won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Maureen Freely is an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator. She is a contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, and Cornucopia, and is the author of The Life of the Party and The Other Rebecca. She is best known for having translated Orhan Pamuk's recent novels: The Black Book, Snow, The Museum of Innocence, and others.