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Metis Fiction
Novel
13 x 19.5 cm, 527 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-361-6
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Prints:
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1st Print: May 2002
3rd Print: September 2007
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Download high resolution copy 
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About the Author
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One of the most prominent and prolific contemporary writers of Turkey, Murathan Mungan has published poetry, short stories, plays, novels, screenplays, radio plays, essays, film and theater criticism, and political columns. He has over fifteen poetry books, among them Osmanlıya Dair Hikâyat (Stories on the Ottomans, 1981), Metal (1994) and Yaz Geçer (Summer Too Passes, 1992) which has attained the status of a cult book due to its continuing popularity. A selection of his poems were translated and published in Kurdish as Li Rojhilatê Dilê Min (In the East of my Heart, 1996). His works have also been translated into Bosnian, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Persian and Swedish. Most recently a selection of his short stories were published in German under the title Palast Des Ostens (2006) and his semi-autobiographical narrative Paranın Cinleri (Money Djinns, 1997) in Greek this year. An Italian translation of the same work is forthcoming. Also his 2004 novella Çador (Chador) will be published in French and Italian. Mungan’s trilogy of plays, “The Mesopotamian Trilogy” has enjoyed successful theater runs across the country and the last play of the trilogy, Geyikler Lanetler (Deer Curses, 1992) is on the 2007 program of the Arca Azzura Theater in Italy. His latest publications in Turkish are Kâğıt Taş Kumaş (Paper Stone Fabric, 2007) a play in three parts; Büyümenin Türkçe Tarihi (The History of Growing Up in Turkish, ed., 2007), a volume of short stories from the history of modern Turkish literature, edited in collaboration with the foremost literary critics in the country; and most recently, Yedi Kapılı Kırk Oda (Forty Rooms with Seven Doors, 2007), a book of short stories.
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Other Books from Metis
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Yaz Geçer (Summer Too Passes), 1992, poetry
Çador (Chador), 2004, novella
Geyikler Lanetler (Deer Curses, The Mesopotamian Trilogy III), 1992, play
Paranın Cinleri (Money Djinns), 1997, narrative
Kadından Kentler (Cities of Women), 2008, Short Stories
Click here for full Mungan list
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Murathan Mungan
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High Heels
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Yüksek Topuklar
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Reviews
Excerpt
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When a commercial artist in her thirties with a socialist past is forced to spend her vacation looking after a precocious five-year-old girl with ambitions in advertising, the generational clash provides a sweeping view of the past two decades of urban Turkish life. In High Heels the bestselling poet, novelist and dramatist Murathan Mungan, a prominent figure on the Istanbul gay scene famed for his intimate analysis of Turkish machismo, takes on the subject of women living out the ambiguous triumphs of feminism in a belated consumerist modernity.
As the narrator tries to entertain her young charge she is confronted with her rushing stream of memories of an unhappy upper middle class girlhood, left-wing feminist politics of university days, bohemian life in rough neighborhoods starting out on a career, and the bittersweet affairs and marriages of successful professionals navigating the identity politics of globalization in late twentieth-century Istanbul.
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Sırma Köksal, Radikal Kitap Eki, May 2002
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"…The issue at hand is the kind of womanliness that is imposed on women. Lovely when necessary, sulky when necessary, impudent, cunning or helpless when necessary… The kind of womanliness which requires that one is resolute and crafty in doing whatever is necessary to have the world and men under her thumb. … This drama between a little girl and a middle aged lonesome woman is hard to let go of."
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The moment the door opened and they came into the living room, I understood the disaster about to befall me. Our first meeting was like a bloody confrontation between two desperate women madly in love with the same man. It was as if she’d come to settle the score. She was going to give me what I deserved. It was blood for blood. Her or me. I stood helpless in the middle of the living room. What I faced was not a five-year-old child but a cunning, bold, vindictive woman. While I looked around stupefied with shock, sensing what was about to happen to me, she left her mother’s side and came over to me, taking affected little steps she thought were elegant. She held out her hand meaningfully with a crooked smile on her face characteristic of the rich, well-educated, black-hearted ingénues of soap opera:
"Hello, I’m Tuğde," she said.
While I was thinking, oh no, she’ll surf all the channels on television every day at three and six o’clock, watching all the soap operas while I quietly go mad, her mother—who by now was also my enemy—said in her sweetest voice:
"Don’t worry dear, she’s very well-behaved, she won’t bother you at all, she’ll sit quietly watching television all day long."
I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the TV sitting there, blissfully unaware with its black screen; no, I couldn’t do anything to that innocent appliance I hadn’t yet finished paying for.
As soon as I saw her I thought how actually I didn’t like children. Yes, actually I didn’t like children. If I thought about it, there wasn’t a single child I could stand for more than half an hour. Or no such child had yet been invented. Even so, I always act as if I get along well with them, that’s the way I behave to the children of my relatives and friends. I usually remember their birthdays and correctly choose gifts they would like. I really did like children for half an hour, really was content to be around them, but after half an hour I wished they could be put in a soundproof cupboard. If the period extended beyond an hour, the cupboard could even be a refrigerator.
It gets on my nerves that they continually wander around wanting something, always asking questions, that this world we tired of long ago is explained to them over and over again; because of them I returned exhausted from places I went to spend a pleasant afternoon or an amusing evening. Yet for whatever reason, almost everyone thought I loved children. Good God, I was a phony! It must be that my answers to all those questions about why a woman my age still did not have a child of her own were phony. I only understood that now; it was not because I’d never married, not because I’d never happened to meet the right person… My excuse for not having a cat, that my work required me to travel a lot, was phony too. I understood that now too. At most I liked the mythology of cats; I didn’t know how to feed a cat, nor was I interested in taking care of one. I got by with the pretense of using gift boxes with pictures of tiny cats on them, sending cute cat greeting cards, and pretending to like the cats I saw here and there.
Because of that damned girl it would become obvious that not only did I not like children and cats, I didn’t like women at all. Good God, could it be that I only liked men? If you took away the guys with gold teeth, the rednecks, the nouveau riche hicks, the yuppies, the ones who spit on the street, pick their noses, honk at you from their cars, and the "gold necklace-diamond-ring-identity bracelet" triangle, there were only a handful left in the world. For me the world was suddenly deserted.
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Translated by Victoria Holbrook.
Longer sample manuscript available in English
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