Broken masculinities: solitude, alienation and frustration in Turkish literature after 1970, by Çimen Günay-Erkol, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2016, 264 pp., €48.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9786155225253
"On 15 July 2016, there was an attempted coup in Turkey and it was followed by harsh governmental measures with dire outcomes. The long-term impacts of the coup attempt are yet to be seen but its immediate consequences have been devastating at a multitude of levels, paralysing many sectors of life. This was just the latest of many coup attempts in the history of the country. Among the many that took place in the Republican period, three were ‘successful’: 27 May 1960, 12 March 1971, and 12 September 1980. Each of these military coups took their toll on the already fragile state of democracy in Turkey, reinforcing the
militarisation of the civic psyche.
In Broken Masculinities, Çimen Günay-Erkol begins her introduction by outlining the various military interventions that have taken place in Turkey in order to set the context for the relationship between politics and the military. She then takes 12 March 1971 as the central temporal moment in her readings of testimonial literary narratives, focusing on the concept of manhood."
