NOVEL BY ORHAN KEMAL

          OUTSIDER GIRL

 Synopsis

 Mazhar Bey, a wealthy lawyer, marries the mild and accommodating Nazan, a girl of modest background whom he met as a student. A life of bliss with their one son is marred only by the presence at home of an arrogant and conceited mother-in-law, who could have walked off the pages of a fairy tale cast in the role of wicked witch. Doting on her son Mazhar, she has no time for Nazan, her new daughter-in-law, considering her to be of ‘servant stock’. It becomes her mission to separate the two, and she tries every possible means of doing so. Mazhar grows sick of the scene at home and finds himself a mistress. In the end, Nazan is forced to leave her husband and face a life of abject poverty. But a case he takes on propels Mazhar towards an untimely demise. Ultimately, poetic justice is achieved and the mother-in-law herself is pitched into a life of poverty…

 About the Novel

 The novel recounts a melodrama constructed along cinematographic lines. This, in turn, is set against a backdrop of confusion and disarray occasioned by the enforcement of Atatürk’s reforms and the process of urbanisation. On this occasion, Orhan Kemal runs his observant eye over people who have left the village and moved to the outskirts of the city, people aspiring to modernity and a prosperous life. The collision of good and evil – in other words, the melodramatic cliché – is favoured because it corresponds as a structure to the characteristics of the age.  

Mazhar Bey, the lawyer, is the progressive, ‘ideal’, intellectual archetype, and through him we see how the people at large respond to the changes brought by the reforms. Mazhar Bey’s differences with his own family are, in fact, his differences with society at large…

 The novel has also been adapted for the screen.   

Orhan Kemal Kültür - Sanat Merkezi
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