Faruk Darvinoğlu

Faruk Darvinoğlu is a Turkish intellectual who had to withdraw from the university in 1982, two year after the brutal military coup in Turkey, and subsequently took up his grandfather's profession of encyclopedist. He discovers a seventeenth-century manuscript at the bottom of a chest overflowing with government documents, while he rummages through papers in his governor's archive. He reads the manuscript with such great pleasure that, unobserved by the archive's custodian, he slips it into his own briefcase so that he can read it over and over again. The book the reader is reading is based on that manuscript. Because, as he says, he and his contemporaries see everything as connected to everything else, it is clear that these events have not only turned Faruk's life upside down, but they have also traumatized him. At that time in Turkish history, everyone other than those in charge...