There are many similarities between the main character, Serra Akguc, and Nuket Aruca. How much did you know her in real life? What kind of relationship did you two have?
Yes, there are many similarities between the novel’s main character Serra Akguc and jazz singer of 1980’s, Nuket Aruca: Things like physical appearance, the way of singing, character, career, the fact that she had a fiancée during that time, the fact that she sang jazz classics without knowing how to speak English.... Jazzino was a club that nearly every jazz musician and jazz lover in Turkey loved from the first day onwards, a place they went to often, and a place where nights of truly, incredibly beautiful music happened. I, as one of the dounders of this club and as a young entrepreneur and artist, spent a quite unique and colorful era of my life here. Some nights I spent there are impossible to describe with words.
I fell in love at first sight with Nuket, yes. Let’s not call it love, but a kind of admire. Just like I wrote in my book, I wanted for Nuket to join Istanbul Jazz Quartet as the lead vocalist. She politely declined and chose to join us as a performer at Jazzino on the nights that she wished.
Is there are truth to the affair that you wrote in your book? Maybe you or someone else had a relationship with Nuket, and you were inspired by it?
I didn’t see Nuket again after Jazzino. Neither do I know whether she was involved with someone or not. At the time, there were rumors that she was very fond of jazz pianist Tuna Otenel. That’s all I know...
Just like I wrote in the book, years later, somehow, her ex-husband Bora Akgun came to the music studio I had set up and brought me the recordings of hers from 2 different music studios. In the conversation we had while we working on the recordings, I learned that Nuket had died years ago in 1987, as a result of a car accident.
Up until then, I didn’t even know she was dead.
Why did you come up with a book of fiction, instead of telling about your actual experiences with jazz musicians?
I don’t write memoirs. On the contrary, I write novels that fall into difficult to believe, near science fiction category. There are many people out there who are more knowledgeable and could do a better job of writing about the jazz world and memories of jazz musicians, than myself. I think they would be more suitable for that instead of me.
Against the Windmills is a novel that speaks of the meaningless search for immortality as a sign of fear of death. It’s not written in a philosophical language filled with metaphors but in a simple, understandable and solid manner. I emphasize that fear of death is the main behavior pattern that lies beneath some of man’s actions that are hard to explain.
We all, secretly or not, wish to live an immortal life and desire to stay forever young. The love story, murder and mysteriously weird stories on the aftermath in the novel are created to drag said prediction to the end and keep the suspense alive as the secret meaning behind the events are solved, step by step. The biographic sense of narration, the jazz club, the music, the love story and all the other conspiracies are tools I used to emphasize the philosophy of the book.
A former policeman has called and threatened you, because of what you wrote in the book. How did that happen?
Back in mid-February, a man who claimed to be a retired policeman from the Istanbul Police Department called to tell me that he has figured out the Serra-Nuket connection and similarity in the book, and that he knew the murder I had written about, had actually happened in reality. I initially thought one of my friends who had read my book were pulling a prank on me, and didn’t give it much thought.
Two weeks later, I had another conversation with him. This time he began threatening me with a surprising amount of details about events that happened 20 years ago. He said he took the book as my confession, and that he would report my crime to the prosecution office. That was a blow. Thankfully he hasn’t called since the end of March, so I suppose I’m not in trouble with him anymore.
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Ercan Akbay’s last novel ‘Against Windmills’, by Dogan Books, is now in bookstores. Having started his career as a writer with ‘Tales of the Weird’, Ercan Akbay begins his new novel by saying ‘Destroying is a creative action.’ Based on one of anarchist philosophy’s main theorist Mihail Bakunin’s well known manifest, Akbay blends his adrenaline filled life story with the crimes of a dark world behind a passionate love story.
There are sections present in the novel that will especially interest jazz lovers. You will read of this on the back cover as follows: “An affair that the young owner of Istanbul’s most fascinating jazz club has with jazz singer Serra, quickly turns into a nightmare. This passionate journey of 20 years turns into an adrenaline filled ritual.” The character of Serra here has many similarities and connections to famous jazz singer Nuket Aruca from the 80’s. Here is our conversation with the author, Ercan Akbay.
There seems a lot of extracts from real life in your book. How much of it actually happened?
As someone who never gets out of trouble, I can tell you that my life is full of adventures and misfortunes. I’m not a writer who writes by solely reading books and thinking, researching while sitting around in his house. I’ve always had resources to create stories with strong content; I prefer to compile the stories I heard from true adventurists with the ones I experienced on the street, and again, tell them with the rhythm and language of the streets. It is my opinion that the content of the book is of number one priority. What is being told is more important than how it’s told. With my novel before Against the Windmills, I also used the same method of gathering weird stories connected to each other, compiled with my own life story.
Who are the other musicians in the book that had their names changed? Did you write them solely based on their real characters?
There are quite a lot of characters in the book under alias; Imer Demirer, Ates Tezer, Oguz Durukan, Selim Benba, Baki Duyarlar, Onder Focan and many more of my beloved friends had to find themselves on these pages. They can right away spot themselves, of course. However, up against the main fiction and philosophy that Against the Windmills tries to articulate, these characters don’t have much significance.
Is the book a love story, or does it contain a deep music-filled story that jazz lovers would be interested in?
Neither. Against the Windmills, categorically, is black fiction; a crime literature novel. If you like, you can call it an adventure or detective story, but I think of having written a science fiction containing humor elements.
There are many people in the literature world who think of science fiction stories or adventure novels as pulp fiction. Some may think of what I wrote as a love-affair novel. Regardless, it doesn’t matter what category my book is put in; the only point I want to make is that all these literature categories considered as pulp, don’t fall outside the literature realm- they are the epitome of literature itself.
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