Book 3: Rojin

Rojin: Fay Kırığı 3 portrays the Turkish Kurdish conflict and is set in Hakkâri, where Mehmet served as a third lieutenant in 1993–1994. Eroğlu treats the details of the war with care: all the raids, clashes, and operations in the novel are real in terms of dates and geographical locations. Mehmet and Rojin, two opponents of the war, tell from their viewpoints the events that were told from the point of view of Mehmet in the first two novels. Although the story is set in the time of conflict, the main characters’ pasts are also given through the stream of consciousness technique. The novel begins as Mehmet arrives in Şemdinli, where he meets his fellow third lieutenants.

Rojin (referred to as Zeynep in the first book of the trilogy), who fights on the other side of the mountain, is a young Kurdish woman who knows four languages, has a Ph.D. in literature, writes short stories, and is able to translate in a few languages. She has gone up the mountain in order to avenge her brother, Ali, who was among the guerrillas and was tortured to death. Coming from Istanbul, Rojin has a hard time adapting to the conditions, and her mind is full of her lover, Nusret, a writer whom she left behind in the city. The novel progresses by developments in the intense Turkish Kurdish clashes from the opposing perspectives of Mehmet and Rojin, and Eroğlu slowly brings together the two characters. The descriptions of the natural environment, with its steep mountains, challenging climate, and animals, is also a major component of the novel.

Mehmet Eroğlu in an interview with Erdem Öztop in Cumhuriyet (2009) explains the reason behind his use of the metaphor of fault lines:

Her fay eninde sonunda bir deprem, sarsıntı üretir. Sorun, bu sarsıntının büyüklüğünün ne olacağı. Depremin şiddetini, yıkıcılığını fayın kaç parçada kırılacağı belirliyor: Tek seferde kırılırsa yıkım çok büyük olur. Bu nedenle bizlere düşen gerilimi azaltacak yollar bulmak. Sorunu edebiyatla çarpıcı bir şekilde ortaya koymak farkındalığı arttıracağı için önemli diye düşünüyorum
(Every fault, sooner or later, produces an earthquake, a shake. The problem is how big that shake will be. The intensity of the earthquake, its destructiveness is determined by the number of pieces the fault will break into: If it breaks at once, the destruction would be great. That’s why our duty is to find ways to reduce the tension. I think it is important to reveal the problem strikingly via literature, as it will increase the awareness).

In his review of the novel in Radikal Kitap (21 September 2013), Türkeş asserted that Rojin is the first novel in the history of Turkish literature to seriously approach the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. He criticized the scarcity of the depictions of the conflict, which has been going on for thirty years, as a notable theme in contemporary Turkish novel, and claimed that Eroğlu in Rojin makes a powerful contribution to peace with a novel of war.