Journey to the Edge of Life

A Turkish writer broods while traveling through Europe in this gorgeous if meandering 1982 novel from the late Özlü, whose Cold Nights of Childhood won the NBCC’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation prize. Two weeks after the death of a lover, the unnamed 40-year-old narrator sends her child to Stockholm and embarks on a journey to visit the graves of the writers who influenced her. Lacking “a steady job or a proper place to live,” she crisscrosses the continent from Berlin to Vienna to Prague and several other cities, keeping a travelogue along the way. Her voyage is conceived, she writes, as a “pilgrimage” to the resting places of those “who have made me who I am”: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo, and Cesare Pavese. Though she encounters a variety of people and places—a Greek lover on the train to Turin, Svevo’s daughter in Trieste—the action is largely interior, as “the thoughts and memories and longings that I have been pushing out my head come pouring back.” The narrator’s ruminations and memories of her earlier life in Turkey offer a view into “literature’s deep waters, churning with love and contradiction, pain, tears, and suicide.” Though tedious in places, Özlü’s discursive narrative finds great clarity and beauty. It’s a worthwhile experiment. (Apr.)