The Memory of Salt
October 2012
Alice Melike Ulgezer / Giramondo
Alberto Manguel, the esteemed reviewer and translator, writes that for Orhan Pamuk, ‘the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun’. A Turkish word of Arabic origin, it encapsulates a loss that is bound to hope, for the Sufis it denotes the ‘spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God’. The Memory of Salt is a tale largely narrated by Ali of bifurcated national identities, terrible madness and love that swings between extreme states of being. Within this narrative of continually shifting temporality, Ali as a young man is told by his devout aunt in Istanbul that in spite of his smiling self he holds much huzun. A third of the way into the book, readers might be taken aback by the idea of a lighthearted Ali, for the one we encounter is filled with melancholy as he struggles to reconcile the genesis of his parents’ love story with its charred detritus.
Alice Melike Ülgezer has drawn on her personal history but written beyond it, employing both poetic and musical modes. Ali’s father, alternately known as Aykut or Ahmet, is seductive, irascible and violently besieged by schizophrenic delusions. It is through this fluid and complex, always unknowable depiction set against the backdrops of Kabul in the seventies, Istanbul both past and present and Melbourne’s Sydney Road that Ülgezer’s book finds its vital source. For Baba, as his son refers to him, is a gifted storyteller whose Sufism informs his music and his very lovemaking. Ali’s admiration for Baba’s life force and magnetism is countered by his repulsion for his destructive addictions and their legacies. It is as if being hounded by the incongruities at the heart of his father impels him to attempt to understand his parents’ relationship. Ali’s mother Mac, an Australian paediatrician, discloses her ex-husband’s beauty alongside his brutality to her somewhat reluctant listener.
At times the writer’s impulse to extrapolate acts to the text’s detriment. When a sentence might have sufficed we are faced with a paragraph and the motif of mapping human geography, which someone like Michael Ondaatje does so exquisitely, can be laboured. However, writing such as ‘We sat shrouded in a thin membrane of the past’ or when Ali refers to Baba as, ‘A nocturnal, numinous nomad he had sung up the secrets of our streets, our spirits’, reveals Ülgezer’s talents. This debut novel contains several images of great beauty; the rose petals that accompany Baba, effulgent images of whirling that surround Ali’s birth.
Indeed, both joy and devotion lessen the darkness. Ali’s grandfather, Tevfik, is a wonderful portrait of a man for whom love is a defining compass. Baba’s mysticism is transcendental even as his psyche snags on his derangement.
At one point, Ali refers to Istanbul as ‘like a palimpsest’ and this description might be applied to the novel as a whole. Baba the graffiti artist is layered – as are we all – but within him resides some existential break that erupts in horror, landscapes transform from desert to cities, unfamiliar languages and rhythms pulsate through the prose. To read this is something akin to the experience Ülgezer evokes of Mac and Baba walking into the salt lake, Lake Tuz; to do so is at once strange and life affirming.