The Competition of Unfinished Stories

Novelist, poet, and internationally acclaimed visual artist Sener Ozmen is one of today’s most exciting voices in Kurdish literature. The darkly comic and profoundly moving The Competition of Unfinished Stories marks his English-language debut. Set in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, The Competition of Unfinished Stories shadows Sertac Karan, a vehement atheist who teaches at an Islamic school. Subjugated by the Turkish authorities, emasculated by his wife, harangued by his family and students, and jaded by prospects for a Kurdish revolution, Sertac begins to lose his mind. Seeking narrative grounding over his life in the stories he tries to write, the eclectic cast of characters populating Sertac’s world fully untethers him from reality. As the novel progresses, these characters—as well as the book’s author and translator—try, and fail, to take control over Sertac’s story, blurring the lines between his waking fantasies, his nightmares, and his fictions. At turns brash, hilarious, unsettling, and poignant, the dizzying plight of Sertac makes it all too clear how language, no matter which one is being used, fails us as often as it helps us. The first novel from the Kurmancî dialect of Kurdish to appear in English, The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a strange and powerful exploration about the schizophrenia of life under colonial occupation that demonstrates how imagination can be more paralyzing than liberating. "The first tiny flakes of snow begin silently collecting on the tips of the weeping rosewood tree’s branches in that godforsaken garden, and Sertac, Codename Revolution, looks out with teary eyes from behind the fogged glass, beholding the scene, which briefly mollifies him with an ill-timed and ill-starred—for was he not ill-starred!—warmth; enraged as he is, he wants to bang his keffiyeh-less and doubt-filled head against the window and scream, but no, it isn’t possible; believing in the revolution keeps him from paying any heed to, or feeling any shame over, all those things that pass through his mind and his heart without his intention, or even his permission, but mandates instead that he let them all fall down on him like the snowflakes outside, that he sit by the window rather than put up with how annoying all the riffraff around him was, all the asses, the idiots, and the slackers crowded into that musty room; and yet, with all the petit bourgeois feelings he feels toward that pitiful, faded rosewood tree, those tiny little bourgeois feelings petit as petit can be that fill his mind and his heart, he wants to cry, cry out, clamor and scream and shout for himself and for all the wretched of the Earth. Who knows, perhaps this half desire had caressed his mind several hours before the snow started, in one of the brief moments of madness that had taken his mind in that room whose door seldom opened." Sener Ozmen is a new media artist and writer living in Wilmette, Illinois. He practiced dissident contemporary art practices that developed in Istanbul after the 1990s, and in Diyarbakir in the 2000s. Writing in his unique language, his articles on topics such as Kurdish identity, nationalism, and production of art in conflict zones have been published in numerous international magazines and newspapers. Ozmen’s short films and video works have been shown in the world’s most respected contemporary art museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum. Nicholas Glastonbury is a writer and translator of Turkish and Kurdish literature. His translation of Sema Kaygusuz’s novel Every Fire You Tend received the 2020 TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology.