Autumn 1975

Autumn 1975 is the emotional measure of the misery Kemal Basmacı fears returning to: a remembered period of anguish over not seeing Füsun that helps explain why, a year later, he begins to organize his life around regular visits to her family. The novel gives the season significance less through a detailed account of its events than through its recurring force in Kemal’s later recollections.

A remembered period of anguish

In October 1976, after five days without calling or seeing Füsun, Kemal finds that his indignation has become a trap. He fears that a mistake might mean never seeing her again, and recognizes that the anger he had treated as a weapon is punishing him instead. Walking alone among the autumn leaves in Nişantaşı, he realizes that seeing Füsun several times a week would be the most hopeful way to regain his equilibrium and avoid falling again into the misery he associates with Autumn 1975.

The season as a measure of separation

The connection is made explicit in Kemal’s later account of his visits to Çukurcuma. Across seven years and ten months, he sees Füsun and her family 1,593 times in 409 weeks, though the visits do not follow a fixed weekly schedule. When he stays away in indignation and tries to convince himself he can forget her, he never allows more than ten days to pass without seeing her. Beyond that interval, he says, his misery would return to the level he endured in Autumn 1975. The season thus supplies a threshold against which the later pattern of visits can be understood.

From anguish to routine

Kemal’s recollection of Autumn 1975 gives emotional cause to the repeated dinners that follow. The Keskin family comes to expect him and keeps a place for him at the table; he, in turn, struggles with the prospect of imposing on them or causing offense by staying away. What begins as an attempt to avoid the earlier depth of misery becomes a sustained domestic routine. Autumn 1975 remains present not as a fully recounted episode, but as the painful past that makes absence feel dangerous and regular proximity necessary.