This Novel is a Novel of Things That Happen

Foreword by Menekse Toprak,

With a chronological biography meticulously prepared by Serdar Soydan

The novel, which tells the lives of a handful of people who are exploited in a textile factory and whose rights have been usurped, is one of the first books published in the social realist line.

When This Novel, The Novel of Things Happening, began to be serialized in the Tan newspaper in 1937, the social realist novel was not a popular genre. In fact, there were almost no novels that went beyond the villages and countryside and told about city life, slums and factories. When Suat Dervis was sent to the Soviets as a newspaper reporter, he left the novel in an unfinished form, with its drafts, to Kemal Tahir, and Kemal Tahir completed the last part. Although he wrote and sent two thick notebooks during the train journey, the newspaper said that the serial did not attract enough attention and asked Kemal Tahir to write the ending.

The novel, written under these conditions and met with the reader, is being published as a book for the first time after eighty-one years, under the name Suat Dervis. Dervis, who reveals that nothing has changed in the conditions and lives of a handful of exploited people from yesterday to today, shows that he is a great writer with his foresight and analyzes that transcend time.

“Dervis is a writer of the 1930s. He describes the poverty of the Edirnekapi area, the working-class neighborhood of Istanbul, so realistically and portrays it so strikingly that sometimes you feel like you see the mine workers in Emile Zola's novel Germinal, and sometimes the seasonal workers in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published two years after this novel. .”

–MENEKSE TOPRAK-

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Editor: Ayla Duru Karadag

Cover Design: Sükrü Karakoç

Dough Type: 2. Dough

Number of Prints: 1. Publication

First Printing Year: 2018

Number of Pages: 272

Size: 13.5 x 21

Language : Turkish