Dozens of them lined up side by side on the shelves of bookstores, as if covering the other books with both hands, shouting "don't buy that, buy me", proudly displayed in the hands of everyone from women returning from sitting at home on the bus or subway to tired-faced students, I would rather read books that are hard to find, sold less, printed less, written only for the "curious", sometimes for a handful, sometimes for a slightly more crowded readership, than popularized, objectified, depersonalized books that are repeated every day somewhere that have been on the bestseller list of so-and-so bookstore for how many months. But it was quite difficult to reach
MyFace Book. The author Çiğdem y Mirol is against genres, and conformism. That's why they couldn't find it in the bookstore. I asked for a novel, they recorded it as an essay, and the author said it was a new genre, a new theory. Good luck to those who understand and are curious, I don't know much about theories and genres…
Talking about this book, one should start with the title. As everyone can easily understand, Çiğdem y Mirol calls the book "My Facebook" with a clever reference to Facebook, the most popular social networking site of today, and presents to the reader the autobiography of a writer-narrator who turns his face to books. What is even more interesting is that the author-narrator in the book transforms her Facebook profile into a text with a fictional integrity. The author doesn't say this anywhere, probably because she thinks that everyone in our age is familiar enough with Facebook to recognize this similarity. She draws a "profile" of an emerging writer by "sharing" with his readers texts written in very different genres by a narrator who wanted to be a writer as a child. Of course, the indispensable element of Facebook, "friends", also appears in the form of the narrator's "witnesses", mostly his siblings and close friends. Just like on Facebook, these witnesses like and comment on almost every post shared. In short, they frequently press the "like" button, which communicators claim has revolutionized the internet community.
Even though she divides it into three parts with an "Inside Me" section,
MyFace Book is dominated by multiple fragments connected by a coherent style rather than a structure that can be divided, fragmented and separated from each other. Contrary to our established expectations, the author presents the reader with a text that has a clear beginning and end, that proceeds in a linear fictional plane, and that narrates the process of its own writing rather than an autobiography in which the narrator becomes subjective. Just as a Facebook profile is shaped at least as much by "friends" as by the author of the profile, "witnesses" are also included in the literary process of
MyFace Book, sometimes through e-mails and letters they send, sometimes through msn conversations. However, many times these are used as textual games to reflect the narrator's inner reality rather than fleshed out characters.
In fact, Çiğdem y Mirol is a writer who plays various games with her readers. From the way she uses her name to the book cover, all the pieces outside the text exemplify this. The games continue inside the text as well. The state of “self-awareness of the text” that we encounter throughout the book makes itself felt with small but entertaining games such as the conscious mentioning of page numbers by the characters, which we often encounter in Fowles, or the narrator's foretelling of an event that we will encounter in the following chapter. The author tells his autobiography and the book tells its autobiography. While the author and the book are the same person in many places, there are moments when the text consoles its narrator who is always worried about not being understood.
Parody and pastiche, the favorite techniques of post-modernists, dominate the whole text and give it its real flavor. In a style reminiscent of paintings that open into each other, the reader finds poetry within a story, a play within a poem, a story within a play, that is to say, many genres existing themselves within each other, and in fact the actual text exists itself through all these. The narrator's stories, poems and plays, which have been published or mailed as letters to a friend, are incorporated into the main text, sometimes in relation to the text, sometimes not. Apart from the narrator's self-quotations, another material of the text is songs. The narrator has an admiration for radios that she repeats often. So much so that the songs that bear witness to her writing experience sometimes drown out the narrator's voice and the reader finds himself listening to songs whose melodies she knows, sometimes completely unfamiliar.
In short,
MyFace Book is an autobiography, but it is not quite like the autobiographies we know. Considering the story of a writer's existence and her theoretical claim, it is actually the story of the creation or co-creation of a new genre. It is perhaps an answer to those who say "it must be a novel". More precisely, it is a story written by skillfully utilizing post-modern narrative techniques, occasionally winking at Joyce and Woolf. More precisely, here is a portrait of an artist as a young woman who has colored the stream of consciousness technique, which (in my opinion) is best applied by Woolf, with post-modern brushstrokes. "If you don't read this story, I cannot exist," says Çiğdem y Mirol. I think she is a writer worth existing.
* Reader – Author Performance by Ayşegül Keskin, Historian of Art and Literature. Originally published here:
https://www.kirpiedebiyatdergisi.com/sanatcinin-bir-genc-kadin-olarak-portresi-yuzum-kitap/ in 2013