İlknur Özdemir

İnci Aral has been one of the most outstanding names of the last thirty-five years of Turkish literature; she deals with social problems, women’s issues and humanitarian matters. It has been thirty-four years since the publication of her first book of short stories, Sugaring Time. She started with short stories and moved to novels, becoming a writer who bears witness to her time. (…) İnci Aral never cuts corners, thoroughly researches her subject matter, and her work never grows dated. Her emotional analyses, unforgettable characters, sophisticated prose and highly effective use of language successfully bear witness to the social events, changes and the people of the time. Her remarkable books present an account of our recent past and place her firmly at the forefront of our enduring writers.

Radikal / February 6, 2011

Gülseren Özdemir

İnci Aral has published a total of eighteen titles since her début on the literary scene in the late 1970s: short stories, essays and novels. Her novels are unconventional in narrative style, and it would be fair to suggest she’s a modernist writer who occasionally displays post-modern characteristics. İnci Enginün considers Aral’s novels some of the best examples of postmodernism, and Modern Times of Deception takes the limelight in this context. In eschewing the socialist approach to literature –a propaganda tool that utilises nothing more that stark realism- as well as the facile postmodernist one –unconcerned with reality, Aral writes highly refined novels illuminating internal and external realities. She uses postmodern techniques on occasion in her work that is a fusion of intellectual, political, social and literary conditions. These techniques are clearly discernible in Dead Male Birds and Modern Times of Deception: Green in particular. The author, however, states that only Modern Times of Deception may be considered a postmodern piece, that this was out of choice, and that she wrote it in this manner to demonstrate that a postmodern text did not need to be shallow. She adds that the novel departs from the style at times.

(Thesis – Aegean University)

Leyla Şahin

The most striking aspects of İnci Aral’s work are the intensity of empathy and the vast resources of sincerity at her fingertip. That she embraces her characters wholeheartedly comes across in nearly all her books. We are faced with a writer who engages closely with her readers, who avoids wearying them or wasting their time. Her skilful use of the language is a rare treat for the reader who enjoys the adventure. (…) I would like to emphasise what a blessing it is for our art of the novel that İnci Aral pulls no punches in boldly confronting controversial topics at a time when spinelessness increasingly becomes the norm.

Cumhuriyet Book Supplement, issue 253

Ömer Türkeş

The issues troubling İnci Aral’s female characters stand apart from the crises besetting the stereotypical women penned by ‘women’s authors’. The main axis in her stories and novels is never women or their problems; Aral well appreciates the difficulty of describing a woman without the difficulty of describing a man, that the individual –no matter how wrapped up in personal issues- is never entirely divorced from time or place. That is precisely why she defines her characters by their relationships, and places men as well women at the heart of her tale. The main feature of the relationship under the writer’s spyglass is lack of relationship or communication. Allow me to add without delay: Aral’s characters aren’t devoid of love or passion by nature; it’s only the consequences of the historical / social conjuncture, of consumerism and their failure to cope with the conventional norms of ethics and values surrounding them that cause this lack of communication. Marriage, of course, is the one single institution thus affected.

Akşam Book Supplement, 24 January 2003

Hande Öğüt

İnci Aral’s main concern is with individual integrity and aspiring for freedom. In her latest novel Saffron Yellow, she sustains the problematic of standing out whilst avoiding pomp and circumstance. Indisputably braver in her thirtieth year in literature, but still as enthusiastic as on the first day, Aral turns her viewfinder on people today who seek a new way of existence beyond the physical, metaphysical or ontological repetition, her own personality flung about in an ultimate play destined to be repeated endlessly, and the individuals of a showy society naturally seeking love and happiness. This is the story of a generation that breaks up as it becomes whole, and vanishes into futurelessness as it breaks up.

Mesele, April 2007 – p4

Erendiz Atasü

İnci Aral has the capacity to catch the common denominator amongst the differences. Her tales continue to run their course inside us with questions we pose ourselves well beyond the moment we turn the last page. İnci’s tales are both deep and wide. They’re deep, their scathing sincerity cuts like a scalpel into the deeper layers of sexual chaos, and capture the seemingly indistinct clues of dreams sprouting from the subconscious. They’re wide as they weld the individual with the social and the universal. İnci’s women bleed spiritually on the earth spinning towards death. Their bodies hurt in a rotten society.

These panoramas and deep cross-sections lit by the flashes of words strengthen the poetic lines of these stories and empower her literary flavour. Aral’s language flows like water from emotion to emotion, from the individual to the social, from the concrete to the abstract, ‘to the bottom of rage, to the futility of passion and to the stifling atmosphere of rooms.’

Sema Aslan

İnci Aral is one of those writers who can easily make her reader identify with her writing. She vividly conveys all the clashes and conflicts troubling the individual as she describes internal worlds, and so creates a highly tense tale. Sexuality, the modes of sexuality and sexual identities take precedence in the liberation of the individual within society, as they simultaneously become part of the impasse.

Radikal Book Supplement, issue 311