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Çalikuşu (the Wren)
17.00 ₾The events in the novel take place in the early twentieth century, near the collapse of a war weary Ottoman Empire and the creation of the Turkish republic. Most of the novel is recounted in first-person diary format by Feride. In the first section, Feride describes her childhood, beginning from the beginning and leading to the events that led her to a strange hotel room. The second and largest section consists of diary entries describing her adventures in Anatolia. The third section is the only one written from the third person point of view, describing Feride’s visit to her home.
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Harem
8.50 ₾This novel ties together the lives of a girl who is taken from her family when she is 7 years old to be raised in the Ottoman harem and a young woman who is getting married at about that same time. Their stories are told side by side, smoothly shifting back and forth between narratives and their connection is tantalizingly concealed until late in the story. There is a moment in the book when one character appears in the other character’s story and the reader discovers how the two stories, seemingly isolated, were in fact connected from the beginning. Though they have lead more or less completely separate lives, they learn the same lesson and are able to ultimately make peace with themselves.
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Istanbul Elefteria
13.98 ₾Yılmaz in this novel retraces through the narration of a love story, one of the darkest pages in the history of Turkey: the attacks on the properties of the Greek community of Istanbul but also of the Armenian and Jewish ones. These events, also known as the Istanbul pogrom, were yet another act for the removal of the Greek minority from the country, before the expulsions of the 1960s.
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Tutunamayanlar (The Losers)
40.00 ₾This novel has been selected by the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO
The young engineer Turgut Özben investigates the reasons behind his close friend Selim Işik’s suicide. People close to Selim Işik pool their knowledge to shed light on the unknown aspects of his life. In his last days, Selim was assembling an “encyclopedia of losers” wherein he had reserved an entry for himself. The encyclopedia proves helpful in revealing self-knowledge to Turgut Özben. In the course of his investigation: he too is a loser, or a perennial nobody; to date he has been going through the motions of habit and ritual. He makes a clean break, leaves home, and boards a train never to be seen again.
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Waiting for Fear
8.00 ₾The stories of Oğuz Atay do not lag behind his novels in terms of the depth of comprehension of daily life, the richness of expression and the energies of taking the reader away. The protagonist of the story that gave the book its name while “waiting for fear” imprisons itself at home is one of the greatest proofs of Atay’s difference in the literary route.
