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FROM THE PUBLISHER - From the INTRODUCTION: FICTION OF A FLANEUR by Talat Sait Halman - Sait Faik lived the life of a flaneur - wandering through the city of Istanbul, absorbing its vivid impressions, eavesdropping on its people, and observing its daily drama. Standing media vitae, he was a reluctant voyeur who frequently found himself dragged into the comic episodes and the tragedies enacted on the street scene. This sensitive and often cynical idler-about-town gave his narrative accounts of Istanbul's human landscape in about 170 stories, two short novels, numerous interviews, and a handful of poems. Immediately after Sait Faik's death in 1954 at the age of 47, a newspaper reporter interviewed some of his non-literary friends and found that these ordinary people - fishermen, youngsters, loiterers, the owners, and patrons of coffeehouses - with whom he had spent a great deal of time through the years, had little or no idea about his fame and stature as a writer or even about his having been a writer at all. Sait Faik's persona, so dominant in his fiction, scrupulously shunned intrusion into the lives of his favorite characters in life. In a poem he expressed an aspect of the way he dealt creatively with his dramatis personae: 'Some days at dusk I would sit/ And write stories/ Like mad/ And the people in my mind/ Would sail out to sea for fishing.' Turkish critics have often stressed Sait Faik's concern for the common man, for the man in the street, or - to use the term which was fashionable in the 1940s and 1950s - 'the little man.' In the case of many writers such an infatuation results from a romantic attitude or an ideology. Sait Faik's stories seldom betray this type of romantic attitude or reveal any social cause per se. His characters are authentic individuals he knew on a personal basis. He did not set them up as symbols or metaphors; he refused to think of any of these as an eidos or topos. The way he saw and depicted them was free and clear of ideological bias. In transposing them from life to fiction, he preserved the integrity of the individual characters, making them live according to their own attributes, idiosyncracies and psychological motives. As the fifty stories in this volume will show, Sait Faik who was once referred to as 'Turkey's Balzac,' an analogy that is difficult to endorse, approached his fiction as essentially a miniaturist and allowed his stories to create a broad panorama of the life of Istanbul. Although no unified structure emerges, it can safely be argued that his work is larger than the sum of its parts. This does not mean that the constituent parts lack inherent strength. A number of his stories can actually be counted among the best of their genre produced in Turkey. According to the Turkish critic Mustafa Kutlu, who published a study of Sait Faik's short stories in 1964, 'Sait Faik, like his contemporaries, projects the image of a realist, but is a romantic in terms of style and the empathy, even love, he feels for the characters he delineates.' In his textual analyses of short stories published in 1979, Professor Mehmet Kaplan, one of Turkey's leading academic critics, comments: 'Sait Faik is a realist in terms of his world-view and narrative style. But he does not merely deal with the external aspects of reality.. Behind the exterior, he finds a kind spirit and a deep significance.. His realism avoids shallowness, encompassing myth, poetry, sentiment, and fantasy; it has a unified view of ugliness and beauty, good and evil - it embraces all of humanity and the world as a whole. It is this profound, wide-ranging, sympathetic and tolerant view of life that makes Sait Faik's stories as richly endowed, complex and lovely as life itself.' Sait Faik's career, which spanned barely twenty-five years from about 1929 to 1954, yielded an output that displays considerable variety of themes and techniques although virtually all of his stories have certain similarities - his unmistakable style, the focal importance of the narrator, the preoccupation with social outcasts and marginal groups, an unfaltering ear for colloquial speech, etc. His stories, in their range of feeling and creative strategies, can be likened to many disparate works by some of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors outside Turkey. Occasionally one finds plots worthy of a de Maupassant, moods reminiscent of a Chekhov, and sometimes the lucidity of a Maugham, although none of these writers - not even some of the French writers he presumably read during his stay in Grenoble - seems to have had any direct influence on him. In some stories, the Turkish writer gives us a blend of fantasy and concrete fact, and the interplay of different levels of reality in the Faulknerian manner. In others, one finds a structural clarity and a crispness of language typical of Hemingway. Sait Faik's later stories occasionally read like Donald Barthelme's early work, sharing the same eery sensations of a foray into the realms of fantasy.

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