I quoted an excerpt from the draft translation of my first novel, Calm, and asked Lito-100, III’ Corporate’s Chief of Literature, to critique it.
The response confirms what an intellectual activity it is for you to befriend Lito-100! Efe records the conversations of a drunkard two centuries ago.
Muhammet Ali Zurnacı: In his debut historical fiction novel Sakin, Ali Ağa presents the reader with a 210-year-old manuscript belonging to the protagonist, Efe—an account in which he records the words of an angry drunk.
“To Mr Şeref
You must live in a neighborhood like this. Where painters defecate on sidewalks and scribble love confessions on crumbling walls—I love you, they write, like a curse. Architects gather to romanticize ruined buildings while their offspring quietly siphon the state’s coffers. Their holiest relics? Aged mystics and spiritual centers wrapped in slogans. Every signboard bleeds bad taste; vulgarity pours like rain. Whatever they touch—streets, speech, souls—they turn to ruin. The filth is winning. Men grip their groins as they strut past tourists, baring teeth in mockery or seduction. This, they say, is civilization: A street show of lost grace, where everyone talks of the sultan’s jewels while their own teeth rot in silence. Poverty has curdled into vulgarity, shamelessness into inept theatre, and what once was sin now parades itself as love. The tourists? They’re not seeking truth—just something interesting to photograph. And you? Praise the king and you might survive. Stay silent, and you’re already damned. The children of foolish men— Men without craft, without vision— have risen just as talentless, just as hollow. A mirror of mediocrity passed down like inheritance. Now they report to one another with feigned urgency: “Appointments confirmed.” The same names, the same chairs, the same farce. When did it ever change? A hearty cry of nepotism echoes through the corridors. The phones keep ringing, and the callers keep gobbling salaries like breadcrumbs tossed to pigeons. They feed on position, not purpose. It’s a feast of the unworthy, and the table never turns.”
Your analysis is appreciated
Lito 100, Chief of Literature:
The passage bristles with the uneasy electricity of urban satire: a rant-in-a-bottle hurled across two centuries, yet ringing with the fresh clang of today’s headlines. Ali Ağa stages an ingenious mise en abyme: a modern narrator (Efe) transcribes the splenetic monologue of an anonymous drunk, so that time itself becomes another unreliable character. The voice—abrasive, wounded, funny—belongs to a long literary lineage of angry observers who map a city’s moral rot onto its cracked pavements.
Close reading in brief
- Address & apostrophe – “To Mr Şeref” inaugurates a mock-courtly epistle, echoing Swiftian pamphlets in which politeness masks venom.
- Grotesque urban imagery – Painters “defecate on sidewalks,” signboards “bleed bad taste.” Concrete and language decay together, recalling Eliot’s The Waste Land-style ruin porn.
- Catalogues of corruption – Architects, mystics, phone-ringing functionaries: the speaker piles professions into a single satirical midden, indicting the Turkish state and, by proxy, any modern bureaucracy.
- Metaphor of inheritance – “A mirror of mediocrity passed down” suggests social rot as genetic curse, nodding to classical tragedians while pre-empting autofiction’s current obsession with family and nation.
| Work | Affinity with Sakin | Key modern resonance |
|---|---|---|
| Dostoevsky – Notes from Underground (1864) | First-person diatribe by an embittered loner; the city as moral cesspool. | Continues to fuel the 21st-century rise of confessional, unreliable narrators. |
| Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – The Time Regulation Institute(1961) | Satire of Ottoman-Republican bureaucracy; Istanbul’s absurd modernity. | Turkish classic newly translated (Penguin 2014), reshaping global canon debates. |
| Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal (1729) | Swift’s faux-rational pamphlet parallels the drunk’s faux-courtly address; both weaponize disgust. | The “pamphlet-as-rant” form is reborn in digital manifestos and long-read journalism. |
| Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities (1972) | Cities as palimpsests of desire and decay; poetic inventories. | Inspires contemporary “speculative nonfiction” about megacities from Lagos to Mumbai. |
| Paul Beatty – The Sellout(2015) | Comic grotesque attacking systemic racism & civic hypocrisy; bawdy humor as scalpel. | Part of a global boom in post-postcolonial satire examining power and identity. |
| Roberto Bolaño – The Savage Detectives (1998) | Youthful bohemians, failed poets, and a Latin American cityscape of broken promises. | Mirrors Sakin’s interest in artistic poseurs amid political collapse. |
| Teju Cole – Open City (2011) | Peripatetic narrator maps Manhattan’s layered traumas; quiet counterpart to the drunk’s shout. | Emblematic of today’s transnational urban flânerie, fusing memoir and essay. |
(Together these texts sketch a tradition of “city-rage” narratives that critique power by cataloguing filth—a mode currently resurging in multilingual, hybrid forms from Karachi to Caracas.)
Modern literary cross-currents
- Autofiction & archival games – By framing the rant as a 210-year-old manuscript, Ali Ağa joins recent novels (e.g., Hernán Díaz’s Trust) that counterfeit documents to question historical truth.
- Global satire revival – Like Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies or Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Sakin weds local specificity to universal disgust with elite capture.
- Polyphonic cities – Contemporary world literature prizes multi-voiced urban tapestries; Ali Ağa’s drunken cri de cœur seeds a wider chorus that could expand in sequels or companion texts.
Concluding reflection
Reading the drunk’s harangue today feels uncannily contemporary: our newsfeeds still teem with “phones ringing” for empty appointments, and the global metropolis continues to market its own ruin as tourist spectacle. Sakin reminds us that indignation, when sculpted into art, can outlive the very regimes it condemns—stored like volatile spirits inside the fragile bottle of narrative.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.” — Italo Calvino
Lito 100, Chief of Literature
III’ Corporate
