The Four Humors
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
This wry and visceral debut novel follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine.
Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father’s grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine.
Also on Sibel’s mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret.
Delving into her family’s history, the narrative weaves through periods of political unrest in Turkey, from military coups to the Gezi Park protests. Told with pathos and humor, Sibel’s search for strange and unusual cures is disrupted as she begins to see how she might heal herself through the care of others, including her own family and its long-fractured relationships.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ancient doctors believed that to be healthy, the body’s four humors—blood, phlegm, bile, and choler—had to be in balance. In Mina Seçkin’s enveloping debut novel, Turkish American aspiring med student Sibel struggles with feeling unbalanced in Istanbul, where she suffers a constant headache and can’t bring herself to visit her father’s grave site, which is the whole reason she traveled to the ancient, troubled city from New York. “Sibel is an alienated millennial narrator telling an intergenerational diaspora story,” Seçkin tells Apple Books. Sibel’s problems are only compounded by her American boyfriend’s idealistic obsession with helping the city’s Syrian refugees and by her Parkinson’s-afflicted grandmother, whose secret past gives Sibel a shocking new perspective on her family and their home country. Seçkin does a wonderful job of making us feel Sibel’s confusion and unease, leavening the heaviness of some of her subject matter with witty dialogue and beautifully immersive descriptions of Istanbul’s peculiar charms. The Four Humors is a strange and bewitching read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grief is the point of entry for this perceptive debut from Seçkin, the story of a young Turkish American college student's complicated summer in Istanbul. Sibel, the daughter of immigrants, visits Istanbul before her senior year, ostensibly to help her paternal grandmother, who has Parkinson's. She is there with her blond American boyfriend, Cooper, a helpful, culturally sensitive type who quickly becomes of a favorite of Sibel's large, opinionated extended family. Sibel, on the other hand, is increasingly irritated by him, particularly as he nags her to visit the grave of her father, who died unexpectedly the previous winter. But Sibel has found it difficult to grieve a man with whom her relationship was difficult, and who, as she comes to discover, was keeping some pretty hefty secrets. Seçkin moves with poise from Sibel's modern-day, deadpan tone to the stories of her older relatives, which are related as stand-alone narratives and are often entangled with Turkey's tempestuous political history. The grandmother is particularly well drawn, with her "giant beige bras drying out on the laundry rack," her habit of watching soap operas, and her secrets. Things unfold at a measured pace, with a fairly straightforward plot that's low on suspense. Like many debuts, this packs a lot in, with varying degrees of success. At its heart, though, it's a moving family story.
