The four humors that pump through my body determine my character, temperament, mood. Blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler. The excess or lack of these bodily fluids designates how a person should be. I don’t know what choler means, and when I google it, the internet leads me to a link asking whether choler is a Scrabble word.
I thought that The Four Humors started with a really strong premise — a twenty-year-old Turkish-American woman makes her annual visit to Istanbul to visit family, this year with her blond American boyfriend in tow — and as this Sibel tries to apply the ancient “humor theory” of illness to her new, chronic headaches, there was a very interesting picture beginning to develop about this young woman who straddles two worlds, feeling more at home in the land (and medicine) of her ancestors. Everything between Sibel and Cooper was interesting and relatable and served to explore the culture divide, but about halfway through, Cooper takes a back seat and the story becomes about Sibel’s family secrets, with long stretches about the history of Turkish politics and student activism, and at that point the narrative lost the human touch for me. I understand that much of this story is based on debut author Mina Seçkin’s own experiences (born in Brooklyn, sent to Istanbul every summer to stay with the grandma who would eventually develop Parkinson’s, the mysterious year-long headache that Mina suffered), and the writing at the sentence level was interesting and strong, but the whole didn’t completely gel for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
They don’t say anything about the new fat on my hips, my arms, even my nose, which can bulb up with flesh, because this year the cause for weight is obvious.They’re afraid of me, and the shape my grief has taken. Blood, you’re lean and shaped as if made from stone. Phlegm, you’re fat. Because humors had to do with passions, temperament, and behavior, of course people had a lot of moralistic ideas about willpower and control. Moral health, which does not interest me.
Grief-stricken after the recent, sudden death of her father, Sibel is sent to Istanbul to study for her MCATs and supposedly to take care of her grandmother — but even with tremors and unsteady legs, Sibel’s grandma is happy to do all the caregiving while Sibel reads ancient texts for clues about the cause of her nagging headache. Her boyfriend, Cooper, is also intending to go to med school, and in between shifts working at the local eye hospital, he is slowly learning Turkish, winning grandma’s heart, and developing a sincere interest in the fate of the Syrian refugees he meets in the streets. As the pair walk along the Bosphorus together, shopping in the markets and eating with family in kebap restaurants, Seçkin paints a vivid picture of modern day Istanbul:
There is the Turkish word hüzün, which cannot be translated into English. Instead of meaning a simple sadness or suffering it denotes a collective, Istanbul-wide phenomenon that some call spiritual, some call nostalgic, but the one thing we know for sure is that the word exists because it is pridefully shared with others. The ideal is not to escape this suffering, but to carry this suffering. It is possessing the weight of the city as you wade through its past and present and, by doing so, you dissolve among many. I am pretty certain — as Ibn Sina was certain, too — that those with an excess of black bile like me are prone to feel this weight. Istanbul is a humor. The lubricant, oily and thick, black humor that begins to leak from my spleen. Istanbul is black bile, melancholy, only disguised as a city.
This was all very interesting to me until, as I said above, the storyline moves to the revelation of family secrets — which seem to come out of nowhere and which don’t really serve the premise — and I began to lose interest. I suppose there is some irony in Sibel and her grandma constantly watching melodramatic Russian soap operas, which Sibel’s mother hates, right up until their own family is revealed to be little more than a soap opera itself:
The women in my family love television. The Turkish shows are about family, culture, and inheritance. My mother, who likes American sci-fi and fantasy story lines, says that we, Turks, are simply not creative enough to produce television that strays from common, overused storylines populated with the same characters: a doting and controlling mother obsessed with her handsome son who falls in love with the wrong woman, all under the purview of an angry father.
The four humors angle was interesting (if maybe a little overused by Sibel) and it occurred to me afterwards that the four parts of this novel may feel disjointed because they are meant to each focus on a different humor (when Cooper is present at the beginning, the prevailing humor is blood [optimistic and sensual]; as Sibel’s headaches worsen and she can’t bring herself to visit her father’s grave, it feels like an excess of phlegm [passive and sensitive]; and as the story then shifts to the love lives of Sibel’s grandparents’ generation, it’s black bile [melancholy and irrational behaviour]; and finally to the youthful activism of Sibel’s parents’ generation, it is choler [excitable and prone to anger]). I can see how this works as a literary framework but it threw me off as an experience (and I could totally be reading something into the disjointedness that isn’t there).
I’m seeing now that I’m full of all four humors, and my excess — any excess is not dangerous or fatal.
Again, this is a very interesting view into the Turkish-American experience and if the storyline had stayed focussed on Sibel — instead of backloading in decades worth of history and politics at the end — I think I would have appreciated it even better. Still, there was much to like in this.
