THE FOUR HUMORS

Seçkin's idiosyncratic debut novel follows its conflicted heroine through a relatively uneventful but richly strange summer in Istanbul.

Turkish American Sibel, who is on summer break before entering her senior year of college, has been dispatched by her family to care for her grandmother, study for her medical school entrance exams, and visit her father's grave. None of those projects is going swimmingly. Instead, Sibel and her grandmother, who has Parkinson's disease, spend their days watching soap operas and eating rich meals. Sibel comes up with every imaginable excuse to avoid visiting the grave, feeling guilty about her father's death because she feels she didn't act quickly enough when he collapsed in front of her. Rather than studying modern medicine, she becomes obsessed with the ancient theory of the four humors—“blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler”—concluding, for example, that “Istanbul is black bile, melancholy, only disguised as a city.” Meanwhile, her well-meaning but semiclueless boyfriend, Cooper, who accompanied her, decides to dedicate himself to curing Turkey's ills. As the summer drifts on, Sibel attends one family party after another, pays peripheral attention to the fraught politics of the country—the novel is set a year after the Gezi Park protests of 2013—and investigates her complicated family history, which turns out to be a soap opera of its own, full of kidnappings and sudden deaths. While it's a challenge to keep track of all of Sibel's current friends and relatives, let alone the preceding generations, and while the novel may be more concerned with the ebb and flow of daily experience than with advancing the plot, Seçkin conveys a convincing, often dryly humorous sense of life in a constantly changing city and of the experience of those who, as Sibel notes at the airport, can “choose whichever line is shorter, Turkish Citizen or Foreign Citizen.”

A captivating treat for those willing to go with the flow.