Rather than spreading wealth or creating better lives for their citizens, many modern governments are perfecting the art of breaking things. Old-fashioned torture combines with modern communication and surveillance in ways that break people through pain, destroy human connection by promulgating paranoia, and poison communities with fear.  

Turkish writer Sevgi Soysal explores these somber themes in Dawn, a novel about a small town under military rule in the 1970s. First published in 1975, the novel is freshly and sublimely translated by Maureen Freely, who has also made Orhan Pamuk’s mazy and hyperlocal maunderings accessible to English-language audiences. Soysal was no stranger to the cruelty of military rule, which was a constant interruptor of Turkey’s faltering democracy until it was usurped by Erdogan’s cult of quasi-religious personality. A feminist activist, Soysal was herself imprisoned for being part of a left-wing organization and died of cancer shortly after her release. Her time behind bars informs every aspect of this gutting masterpiece. 

What happens? We open at a small group gathered for dinner party in a distant rural town far from the center of politics. The dinner is modest, the host isn’t wealthy, and the guests are mostly family. The dinner gets raided by the police, who have been led to believe there’s a Communist conspiracy afoot. This, we are shown, is not uncommon. 

The guests reflect an uneasy cross-section of Turkey. The house belongs to an older man, currently a factory worker, who belongs to a regionally important but not wealthy family. His dinner guests include two brothers, his nephews. One of them, a leftist just released from prison, is trying to decide what to do with his life. The other is a local lawyer, not at all politically active, who is ostensibly just trying to keep his head down. But this brother has also made an unexpected friendship with Oya, a woman recently released from prison who is now in lonely exile, another kind of incarceration.

In the novel’s opening section, Soysal dives back into the lives of the guests, tracing the decisions and events that have led them to this fateful moment. By devoting so much attention to what comes before the police kick down the door, Soysal makes you feel how that splintering rupture divides life into before and after. Mustafa, the brother who had been arrested, remembered his time  being tortured. He yearned for deliverance from “the clanking chain” and  “the screaming and the wailing” and from “his own hideous flesh. And his tears.”

Perhaps the most affecting flashbacks belong to Oya, the exile who just happened to be at dinner, and now sees herself once again slipping toward prison. In her recollections, which mirror Soysal’s own prison experiences, she finds some joy in the raunchy sisterhood behind bars, but her memories are also pinched, fearful, feculent—and violent. One of the prisoners describes to Oya her assault by truncheon: 

[T]hey had left themselves behind somehow. It no longer mattered to them who I was or what I was. All that mattered was the ugliest penis of the century. Using it in the ugliest way they dared. Rejoicing in it.

The jarring violence of this flashback comes as the book shifts toward slapstick in a section devoted to the interrogations. While meanness prevails, it is clear there is no case. As the cops keep trying to figure something out, they also keep shifting the blame, trying to protect their careers while cajoling and beating their way to a successful outcome. With this strange and effective contrast, Soysal demonstrates how political oppression affects everyone, from the beaten to the powerful, as it mutates every relation.

As the third section opens, we begin to detach from the main characters. Soysal gives us a great gift by pulling outward. As dawn breaks over the town, Soysal lets us see how thorough Emergency Rule has been, beyond the shadows it has cast over the characters we’ve already met. The section starts with a loathing of the grotesque and idle rich, contrasting their lives with the poor, for whom dawn “is worth the wait.” As we move through this city, floating in and out of lives for a paragraph or a page, the sun shines on the rich and the poor, the powerful and the miserable. Dawn breaks over the prostitutes and their uncaring johns, the fragile stability of the bourgeoisie and the precarity of the Roma. Soysal shows the scope of this town, swooping into lives to give us a glimpse of how they live under the shadow of pompous cruelty. 

One of the most affecting little swooped-upon stories is a paragraph spent on young Emsal, upset because he dropped his construction paper, the kind his teacher required, in the mud. Chickens run over it. He is crying in front of the store, whose keeper tells him to scram. He “spends a few minutes envying those who don’t have to go to school. Then he’s on his way. When he gets to school, his teacher will scold him for having no construction paper, and knock his head, too.”

Cruelty is omnipresent throughout. The powerful believe in cruelty, in violence; these things are what they know. This faith trickles down, as everyone gets knocked on the head and turns around and knocks the next head lower, and on and on unto poor little Esmal. That’s how a society is broken and how it breaks itself. 

But Oya, and Soysal, have a different faith. They actually believe the world can be better. Soysal gave her life to this belief, and Dawn, which ends on a hopeful note, illuminates a path. We’re not there, not even close. But nor are we completely broken. 

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Sevgi Soysal was born in Istanbul in 1936. In 1974, Soysal won the prestigious Orhan Kemal Award for Best Novel for Noontime in Yenişehir, which she wrote while in prison. Dawn was published in 1975, a thematic companion to her memoirs of prison life. She died of cancer in 1976, at the age of 40. She left behind an incomplete novel, Welcome, Death!

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Widely regarded as the foremost translator of Turkish literature, Maureen Freely was born in the US, raised in Turkey, and educated at Harvard. Her translated works include five works by the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Sevgi Soysal was the first writer she ever translated.

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Brian O’Neill is an independent writer out of Chicago focusing on books, international politics, and the Great Lakes. He blogs infrequently at shootingirrelevance.com, and can be found tweeting on books, politics, and baseball @oneillofchicago.