Magus - Bozcaada - Fowles

Magus - a novel by John Fowles - is my favorite book. There are so many elements in it that I like. It is the book for instance which made me question the "realness" of things around me in the most surprising manner: One night reading the book, I must have fallen asleep for a couple of hours to wake up in the middle of the night. I walked to the fridge in the kitchen - a reflex by me -, opened the door, looked into it and then for at least 5 seconds there was a time where I couldn't tell whether what was happening at that moment was real or not. I'm not talking about a case where you would merely try to tell, what you encounter is a dream or not. It was that coupled with: "Suppose this fridge is real; but the way I perceive the feta cheese in it - it doesn't feel real at all. Maybe the fridge is real but the cheese is a set up."

Bullshit in the end - but this is what this book does to you. It shakes your sense of reality - strongly, subtly and in a very smart, intelligent way.


Another thing that stroke me right away was that it was set on an imaginary Greek island - Phraxos (means "fenced") which Fowles created based on this experience in the Greek island of Spetsai. While the atmosphere he describes establishes the perfect background for his mind game, the way he explains the atmosphere in these islands is simply magic - particularly for someone like me with strong ties to one particular island in the very same Aegean sea: Bozcaada (Tenedos in Greek).




Now after maybe 7-8 years, I have returned to this book, this time reading its English original. How different it feels when compared to reading its Turkish translation! And how different the book feels after all the experiences I had in my last decade. 


Anyway, this is how he describes his experience in Spetsai in his introduction for Magus:


"...No writer will happily disclose the deeper biographical influences of his work, which are seldom those of outward date and occupation and I am no exception. But my island of Phraxos (the "fenced" island) was the real Greek island of Spetsai, where I taught in 1951 and 1952 at a boarding school... 

Away from its inhabited corner Spetsai was truly haunted, though by subtler - and more beautiful - ghosts than those I have created. Its pine-forest silences were uncanny, unlike those I have experienced anywhere else; like an eternally blank page waiting for a note or a word. They gave the most curious sense of timelessness and of incipient myth. In no place was it less likely that something would happen; yet somehow happening lay always poised. The genius loci was very similar indeed to that of Mallarme's finest poems of the unseen flight, of words defeated before inexpressible. I'm hard put to convey the importance of this experience for me as a writer. It imbued and marked me far more profoundly than any of my more social and physical memories of the place. I already knew I was a permanent exile from many aspects of English society, but a novelist has to enter deeper exiles still.
...
"

I was going to write an entry about Bozcaada but I thought this paragraph above sums it all so perfectly that it will hold the need for a while. 


May you rest in peace, John, my man.

Naked side of Bozcaada as seen through my eyes during a winter storm - 5-6 years ago. Overlooking to Ayana bay.