Hello my name is Ece Temelkuran. I am the
author of How to Lose a Country and I
try to lay out the seven common patterns
of global rising right-wing populism.
I am from Turkey and we have experienced
the most devastating form of right-wing
populism as you might have already
noticed but this book is not about
Turkey at all, it's about the entire
world and probably about your country too
I noticed seven common patterns within
all these countries that have been
subjected to rising right-wing populism
and I wrote about them. It's a book that
tells stories of people, stories of me
and also there is some theoretical parts
in the book. I'm here in Waterstones
Piccadilly and I want to share three
books that are very special to me today.
One of them is Clarice Lispector, near
to the Wild Heart.
Clarice Lispector is a Brazilian
writer and she is in fact known to be
the Brazilian Virginia Woolf. She's an
amazingly beautiful woman and in fact
she acted in movies as well but also an
amazing amazing author. She does hardcore
literature so it's not a page-turner, the
books that she has written.
She is also special writer to me because
this is one of the writers I share with
my very, very close friend Annalise Peck
who's also a novelist. So whenever I get
really tired of life let's say and the
banality of it in general I just open a
page and read a few sentences to remind
myself where I actually belong: to
literature. And the second one is another
fiction writer that I, not only as a
writer, but also a political figure, adore.
Arundhati Roy wrote The God of
Small Things years and
years ago. And she wrote this one novel
and she got the Man Booker award
as you already know. Arundhati Roy is a
political figure and I, you know, admire
her for being so vocal about several
political issues that we have
been grappling with lately. She later
wrote a more political novel called
Ministry of Utmost Happiness and she
has been criticized after this novel for
her new novel and I find it quite unfair.
Because she tries to put all those, you
know, impossible to untangle issues into
literature and that is an amazing,
amazing effort I think. I met her once,
years ago during the Iraq International
Tribunal. I was a journalist and she was
there in the tribunal and while
I was interviewing her she called me...
'You are the girl with the big eyes.' So I hope
she remembers me still. I can
never forget her. Here's a book from
Hannah Arendt she's now famous all of a
sudden because of the political turmoil
that all of us are going through. She was
not so popular a few years back but now
she's on the bestseller list. This is one
of her books: Eichmann in
Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.
For anyone writing on today's
political issues Hannah Arendt is a must-read,
obviously, but especially this book
might be very inspiring for those people
who are fed up with banality of evil,
the ordinariness of evil. In my book that's
going to be out in February I wrote that
the term banality of evil should be
reversed in fact to become evil of
banality and that's another long subject.
But Hannah Arendt is not only important
politically and philosophically also
she's important to me personally because
of the subject of forgiveness. Hannah Arendt was a student, also lover, of Heidegger
when she was taking lessons from him. But Heidegger as
you might have you know learned already
was a Nazi for a good part of his life.
So Hannah Arendt was a Jew, she had to run
away from Germany to the United States
and then for 30 years she thought if she
can forgive Heidegger. And 30 years later
she went back to Germany,
she felt completely alien and we don't
really know if she really forgave
Heidegger or not. That has always been a
curious question for me.
