The Madman's Shirt (Book)

Deli Gömleği is the first short story collection by Güray Süngü, first published in 2010. The book consists of twelve stories in total. Based on its stories and themes, the book was awarded the Necip Fazıl Short Story Prize in 2014.

Content of the Book

The stories focus on alienation, individual loneliness and dead ends, the society-individual conflict, the lives of uniform, class differences, and individuals struggling with the crisis of modern society. The titles of the stories are as follows: “The Place No to Escape”, “The Scent of My Dreams”, “I Should Have Seen You”, “Are You Hopeful?”, “KOrKU^【1】”, “To Be Able to Live”, “Midnight Half-Night”, “Once in Samatya…”, “What I Could Touch”, “Passion”, “The Two Hundred and Seventeenth or Nobody”, “Deli Gömleği”.

Published when the author was in his thirties and his first short story collection, Deli Gömleği is filled with the anxieties brought by the modern world and the characters who endure them. Despairing and painful loves, loneliness, uncertainty, alienation, the desire to flee, melancholy, murder, suicide, and death are among the central elements in the book. The work also contains social critique and is rich in characters overwhelmed by alienation and the burdens of the age and modernity.

Moreover, fanatical West, extreme materialism, rupture from tradition, and drowning in modernity are recurring conditions in the stories of this book.

Although no explicit temporal setting is provided in the stories, based on the themes and critiques presented, it can be concluded that the events take place in the 21st century. Many of the stories are set in Istanbul.