Cumhuriyet Kitap – Debut

In Debut, while many traces of the depths of the author's life can be seen, one can find a love story set on the metro; extraordinary events that come about via Facebook, death and murder fantastically mocked, or scenarios of the future.

Letters used to be written and read. Delivering them took days. In fact, the later they were received, the more meaningful their contents became. The letter was one of the builders and representatives of written culture. But correspondence, the habit of writing letters, is hardly seen around any more. The number of people lamenting the disappearance of this tradition is quite large too. Yet how many of those who complain of this loss have an account on Facebook — and don't those who long for handwriting today pass on what they have to say to one another using tools such as Gmail and Yahoo, and enjoy that convenience? Sadly, even attempts at discussing the necessity of letter writing are kept on forums as nostalgic records, and it is known that the answer to these questions lies in the number of people using these tools to communicate, which nearly approaches the proportion of readers on earth.

Not long ago — until fifteen years back — the computer was an expensive device; now it is easily within everyone's reach. Inside it is the internet, which pulls every kind of 'trick' and quickly brings us together — simultaneously — with many people and much information. Indeed, the form of communication carried out via computers or mobile phones has been so internalized that for a person who uses them, waking up in the morning to find that someone has deleted them from their MSN account, or that the number of people in their Facebook account has dropped sharply, means the same as that day turning into a nightmare. Even imagining such things happening can distress the user. Setting aside building a critical theory of this way of life, it is a fact that the majority live in the way the internet allows. But until now, the reflections that this culture — which takes up a striking share of the time of those under a certain age — has brought to our literature have been found in only a few works.

FACEBOOK-STYLE LOVE

One of the books with such content is the short-story collection Debut, presented with an interesting design. Debut is Erdem Genç's first work. It takes its name from the French word meaning 'pioneer' or 'first'. The book's stories begin on page 125 and run backwards, and what Genç has to tell ends on page one.

The biography of the author, born in 1983, is quite packed. Genç has a long life filled with writing about writing and music. For example, in his high school years a Rock magazine he excitedly launched dragged Genç all the way to court because the legal permits had been forgotten — and this magazine was not his first experience. His relationship with magazines and writing goes back to his primary school years.

Looking at Debut's table of contents, one comes across its eleventh story, "Feysbuk Diye Bir Site" (A Site Called Facebook), clearly written around internet communication. Its first long narrative features a love affair mixed up with Facebook. The others, too, are furnished with internet culture and footnoted. In Ukde there is a sentence quoted from the "literature" made on the internet, while in "Metrodaki Kız" (The Girl on the Metro) the name of Facebook's founder comes up. The love story that follows on the metro is an adventure that unfolds in line with Facebook rituals. In the stories that stay away from communication technology, the extraordinary events that befall young protagonists living ordinary lives are nourished by the associations of visual culture. All thirteen stories of the book contain situations, again not unfamiliar to the reader, of young people who differ from one another but seem familiar when you meet them on the street.

A STORY FOR ROCK

In music terminology, Debut also means a first album. Genç, who writes for various music magazines and also has a band, builds with this book a meaningful bridge between music, the new communication culture and literature, opening passages that bring them closer to one another. Genç's story collection also includes experimental attempts. In the story titled 21, a tale made up of predicates surprises the reader and in this way binds them to the narrative. With its surprises, its different contents and its plain language, Debut has built bold new worlds. For example, "Yeni Başlayanlar İçin Rock Ortamları" (Rock Scenes for Beginners) (Novel Demo) is a writing experiment constructed with this courage. As far as can be understood, a novel with the same content will come from Genç, but even in this form it retains the quality of being an interesting story. The index placed at the end of the book, linking to the book's words, also holds the distinction of being a first in literature.

According to one theory, a person turns into the communication device whose button they press: the message they want to convey, their memory, gradually their soul — in short, their life, everything. This line of thinking is of course debatable, but it is a fair judgement that our living space in computer environments is expanded in proportion to our address and photograph, just as it is restricted. In terms of content, how much space communication technology should take up in literature is a separate argument. With his book, Erdem Genç perhaps puts to the Turkish reader for the first time the question that needs to be asked — as a somewhat technology-friendly man of letters. That is why Debut is important even by its very existence.