Three Fingers of Truth: Fragments of a Life in Turkey

Creative. Philosophical. Funny. Melancholic. Irreverent. Historical. An unnamed narrator, living in Istanbul, Turkey, is asked by his friend, Thomas, to write an introduction to his manuscript. After Thomas leaves the narrator with a stack of unorganized papers, he realizes too late that he will be doing more than writing an introduction. Over the course of several years, and usually after drinking, the narrator organizes fragments of Thomas’s writings into a book. Usually ironic and irreverent, he comments and describes pieces of his own life as he sloppily stitches Thomas’s literary fragments together. The result is a collusion of literary forms and subjects derived from Thomas and the narrator’s life in Turkey. The fragments include diaries, essays, transcripts, and articles covering topics somehow connected with Turkey, including mosques, Eden, Armenia, paradigms, Cappadocia, gods, love, cancer, the sublime, Istanbul minibuses, and the European Union. Ridiculing, criticizing, clarifying, and praising, the narrator interrupts Thomas’s fragments with fragments of his own. Humor, truth, embellishment, and melancholy are woven together into a multicolored (and slightly soiled) rug of life in Turkey. Did Cyrus Hamlin really write that about Armenians? Is there really an International Journal of Pedestrians? Where did you find Adalet’s 19th century diary? What’s all this talk about paradigms? Which came first: rocks or God?