'Aylin' by Ay?e Kulin

'Aylin' by Ay?e Kulin, translated by Dara Çolako?lu (Amazon Crossing, 267 pages, $25)

This is a deeply silly novel - a cheesy 300-page melodrama full of ill-fated intercontinental marriages, abortions, professional triumph and despair, shotgun romance, and death. The eponymous protagonist lives a life full enough for 10 people at a hyperactive pace, with the action skipping around manically from page to page. We're told at one point that Aylin's "soul could not be confined to cities and continents," but marriages and miscarriages can apparently be confined to a single paragraph. It's all quite ludicrous, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it at one level, reveling in the trashy absurdity of it all.   

Author Ay?e Kulin is among Turkey's most popular novelists, and this book was first published in Turkish back in 1997, only appearing in English this year. It opens with a (quite tedious) recounting of our heroine's illustrious family history. Once that is out of the way, we're sent us on a whirlwind tour of Aylin's hectic, glamorous, preposterous life. She enjoys a privileged jet-setting childhood; has an unhappy and abusive marriage with a prince from Libya after a chance meeting at a restaurant; becomes a hippy in 1960s Paris; enrolls at university to study medicine; marries a young Swiss nuclear physicist professor called Jean-Pierre; opens a successful psychiatry practice in New York; falls in love with a U.N. Ambassador to Afghanistan twice her age; marries a Jewish Turkish immigrant; has multiple abortions and multiple miscarriages; brings up children; and rises to the rank of a lieutenant-colonel after working for the U.S. military. It's about as bonkers as it sounds.

At one point Aylin's sister Nilüfer tells her she is "like a...