This final book written by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet tests the borders between fiction and memoir.
It is 1925 in Izmir, Turkey and Communist party member Ahmet is hiding in a stone cottage. He is being pursued by the secret police as he tries to set up an underground printing press. Time and memory merge and jump from Ahmet’s earlier years in Turkey and Russia to the years and experiences to come: as a university student in Moscow in his early twenties, infatuated with a Russian girl and caught up in the euphoria of revolutionary Communism; as a self-styled revolutionary in Turkey, spending years in and out of prisons; and as a sixty-year-old exile in a very different Moscow, taking stock of a life committed to utopian ideals. Life’s Good, Brother captures everyday exigencies as well as the passionate undercurrents influenced by Hikmet’s tumultuous life.
To define this novelas an autobiography would be reductive. It is the story of a people, told with the creative force of a poet.
