MAURICE DEKOBRA AND TURKEY

Abstract

Maurice Dekobra, who is nowadays unfairly forgotten, was, in the interwar years, in thethis period called “the Foolish Years”, the most famous novelist whose books had huge print runs. He invented a new kind of novel, the “cosmopolitan novel”, a fascinating mixture of sex, adventures, travels all over the world and politics. The action of three of his novels takes place in Turkey, a country he obviously liked, and two of them deal with two particularly disturbed times of his history; when, 1n 1907, the ottoman empire was at the point of death and the sultanate was giving way to the modern republic of Mustapha Kemal, and when, 1n 1925-1926, the President was undergoing a communist coup d’Etat.