CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

How I Got Rid of Some of My Books

During the second of the two recent earthquakesthe one that hit Bolu in
Novembera knocking sound was heard from one end of my library; then for the
longest time the bookshelves creaked and groaned. I was lying on the bed in the back
room, a book in my hand, watching the naked lightbulb sway above me. That my
library should conspire in the earthquakes wrath, that it should confirm and dignify
its messagethis frightened me, and the apocalyptic intimations made me angry. The
same thing had happened during the aftershocks of the previous weeks. I decided to
punish my library.
This was how, with a strangely clear conscience, I picked 250 books from my
shelves and disposed of them. Like a sultan pacing among a crowd of slaves, singling
out the ones to be lashed, like a capitalist pointing out the lackeys to be sacked, I
made my selection summarily. What I was punishing was my own past, the dreams
Id nurtured when Id first found these books and picked them up, bought them, taken
them home, hidden them, read them, and labored over them so lovingly, imagining
what I would think when reading them in the future. On reflection, this seemed less
like punishment than liberation.
The happiness it gave me? This is a good place to begin a discussion of my
books and my library. I want to say a few things about my library, but I dont wish to
praise it in the manner of one who proclaims his love of books only to let you know
how exceptional he is, and how much more cultured and refined than you. And
neither do I wish to seem like those ostentatious booklovers who will tell you they
found such and such a rare volume in a little secondhand bookstore in the back streets
of Prague. Still, I live in a country that views the nonreader as the norm and the reader
as somehow defective, so I cannot but respect the affectations, obsessions, and
pretensions of the tiny handful who read and build libraries amid the general tedium
107

and boorishness. All that having been said, the matter I wish to discuss here is not
how much I love books but how much I dislike them. The best and quickest way to
tell this story is to remember how and why I got rid of them.
Since we doto some degreearrange our libraries so that our friends will
see our books as we want them to be seen, an easy way to clear them out is to decide
which books wed prefer to, shall we say, hide or banish altogether, so that our friends
wont see them at all. We can throw large numbers of books away just so no one will
know you ever took such nonsense seriously. As we pass from childhood to
adolescence and from adolescence to youth, this particular obsession takes hold.
When my elder brother gave me the books he was ashamed hed read as a child, and
the bound collections of soccer magazines (like Fenerbahe) that had ceased to
interest him, he was killing two birds with one stone. I used the same technique to get
rid of many Turkish novels, Soviet novels, bad poetry collections, and sociology
texts, not to mention middling examples of village literature, and the left-wing
pamphlets Id collected in the same way as the archivist in The Black Book. In the
same manner, I dealt with the popular science books Id bought periodically and the
vanity memoirs about how so-and-so found success, which I could not help reading,
and various works of refined pornography, without illustrations, first consigning them
anxiously to an obscure corner before throwing them away.
When Ive decided to throw a book away, the thrill of degradation masks deep
grievances not immediately apparent. What is degrading is not the disquieting thought
that this book (a Political Confession, a Bad Translation, a Fashionable Novel, a
Collection in Which All the Poems Are Alike and Like All Other Poems) is in my
library at all, it is knowing that there was a time when I took this book seriously
enough to pay money for it, kept it sitting on my shelves for years, and even read
some of it. Im not ashamed of the book itself, Im ashamed of having once accorded
it importance.
Here we come to the real issue: My library is not a source of pride but of selfrevenge and oppression. Like those who take pride in their education, I too sometimes
take pleasure in looking at these books, passing my hand over them, and picking up
some of them to read. In my youth, I would imagine myself posing in front of my
books, once Id become a writer. But now there is only the crushing embarrassment of
having invested time and money in them, in having carted them home like a porter
and then hidden them away; what makes me most miserable is to know I have been
108

attached to them. As Ive grown older, I have perhaps begun to throw away books
to convince myself that I possess the sort of wisdom to be expected in the owner of a
library made up of books he himself has read. But I keep buying books at a faster rate
than I throw them away. And so if I were to compare my library to that of a well-read
friend in a rich Western country, his would have many fewer books than mine does.
Fortunately, for me the imperative is not to own good books but to write them.
A writers progress will depend to a large degree on having read good books.
But to read well is not to pass ones eyes and ones mind slowly and carefully over a
text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a
few books in a lifetime. Even the most finely honed personal library is made up of a
number of books that are all in competition with one another. The jealousies among
these books endows the creative writer with a certain gloom. Flaubert was right to say
that if a man were to read ten books with sufficient care, he would become a sage. As
a rule, most people have not even done that, and that is why they collect books and
show off their libraries. Because I live in a country almost devoid of books and
libraries, I at least have an excuse. The twelve thousand books in my library are what
compel me to take my work seriously.
Among them there are perhaps ten or fifteen books I truly love, but Im not
sentimental about this library. As an image, a collection of furniture, a pile of dust, a
tangible burden, I dont like it at all. To feel an intimacy with its contents is like
having relations with women whose chief virtue is their being always ready to love
us; the thing I love most about my books is that I can pick them up and read them
whenever I wish.
Because I fear attachments as much as I fear love, I welcome any pretext to
get rid of books. But in the past ten years Ive found a new excuse, something that
never occurred to me before. The authors whose books I bought in my youth and kept
and sometimes even read, because they were our nations writers, and even quite a
few of the writers I read in the years that followedin recent years they have
colluded to assemble proof of how bad my own books are. In the beginning I was
happy that they took me so seriously. But now I am glad to have a pretext even better
than an earthquake for clearing them out of my library. This is how my Turkish
literature shelves are quickly losing works by halfwitted, mediocre, moderately
successful, bald, male, degenerate writers between the ages of fifty and seventy.

109