The Companion

Jale Parla, Professor of Comparative Literature at Bilgi University, wrote in a critical discussion of the novel: “The Companion is an anti-bildungsroman, a novel about the failure or refusal to grow. Everything has a history, even the lack of growth; The Companion is that history. It’s a novel of transparent, brittle children – children who weigh next to nothing when adults in the novel try to pick them up or hold them. It is a story of how such children alternately rebel against and are crushed by the adult world, as if being transparent, they have no shadows of their own, but only dwarves as companions.”