Gossip of Spare Times: Memory, Province, and Boredom in Stories by Cemil Kavukcu

Abstract

Cemil Kavukcu (b. 1951) made his mark in Turkish literature, especially in the 1990s. In the stories that he published in Bos Zamanlar (Spare Times) (2022), he draws attention to dilemmas in the inner worlds of individuals who have experienced both provincial and urban life. Spare Times, including six stories, one of which is three-layered, deals with people who are stuck between bygone days and childhood, provincial life and modernism, boredom and crisis, escape and sanctuary, emptiness and routine. Kavukcu, who had a provincial life in his childhood and first flush of youth, lived in the city during his university years and career, which reflects in his stories as significant autobiographical experiences in terms of conveying both collective subjects bored with ordinary and repeating relationships of provincial sociology, and crises and distress of urbanites to the fiction. While a bourgeois individual tries to push back the clock and write new stories to get rid of boredom, people in the province attempt to get rid of the vicious cycle of life by making up stories and exchanging gossip. The stories in the book have strong autobiographical references through his fictional author figuration, which shows that Kavukcu also does not have any other remedy but to create new stories and write in the same state of boredom. In this article, I tried to bring the author's reality into a connection with the past, childhood, province, boredom and crisis by examining their impacts on story creation in Cemil Kavukcu's Spare Times.