Hasan Ali Toptaş is a prominent Turkish

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist and short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 writer. He was born in Denizli

Denizli

Denizli is a growing industrial city in the Southwestern part of Turkey and the eastern end of the alluvial valley formed by the river Büyük Menderes, where the plain reaches an elevation of about a hundred meters. Denizli is located in southwestern Turkey, in the country's Aegean Region.The city...

, Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

. His first short story book Bir Gülüşün Kimliği (The Identity of A Laughter) was published in 1987. An important Turkish scholar, Yıldız Ecevit nicknames him "a postmodern

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

 modernist

Modernist literature

Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...

" and calls him "a Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 in Turkish literature

Turkish literature

Turkish literature comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today...

", in her workTürk Romanında Postmodernist Açılımlar (The Postmodernist Expansion in Turkish Literature). In fact, Hasan Ali Toptaş's 1999 Cevdet Kudret Literature Award winner Bin Hüzünlü Haz is, on the one hand, a postmodern novella in terms of pluralism, metafiction

Metafiction

Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...

 and intertextuality

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...

. On the other hand it contains a lot of kafkaesque elements in terms of depicting an absurd, surreal and paradoxically mundane reality.

Works

• Yalnızlıklar (Solitudes) - 1990
• Ölü Zaman Gezginleri (The Dead Time Travelers) - 1993
• Sonsuzluğa Nokta (Full Stop to Infinity) - 1993
• Gölgesizler (The Shadowless) - 1995
• Kayıp Hayaller Kitabı (The Book of Lost Dreams) - 1996
• Ben Bir Gürgen Dalıyım (I am A Hornbeam Branch) - 1997
• Bin Hüzünlü Haz (A-Thousand-Gloomy Pleasure) - 1999
• Uykuların Doğusu (The East of Slumbers) - 2005

External links

• The Official Site of H. A. Toptaş