Synopsis

Halilhan Sunteriler, would-be entrepreneur, rescues from the scrap heap a red Volvo, which he believes will lead him to big money in business ventures. So he solicits the help of his staunch friend Gogi, the most “cultured” man of the neighborhood, and gradually Halilhan’s two younger brothers, Hazmi and Mesut, are also drawn into the project.

With penetrating insights into the poor man’s tragicomic hunt for money in the surreal world of commerce, the final confrontation of brothers Halilhan and Hazmi provides the open end for a story of unending struggle.

Biography of the Author

Elif Shafak, born 1971 in Strasbourg, spent her teenage years in Spain before returning to Turkey. She is an outstanding name amongst young Turkish authors, and has written four novels and won the Mevlana Prize for the best work in mystical and transcendental literature. She holds a masters degree in Women’s Studies and is currently an Assistant professor at Tuscan University, Arizona.

Laural Merlington has performed and directed for 30 years in regional theaters throughout the country. She has recorded over 100 audiobooks, including many by Fern Michaels, and is the recipient of several AudioFile Magazine Earphone Awards. In addition to her extensive theater and voiceover work, Laural teaches college in her home state of Michigan.

Synopsis:*

Prominent writers in Britain praise The Other Side of the Mountain:
“This is a remarkable and important novel, a powerful evocation not only of Turkish history through the twentieth century, but also of world history and of the interweaving of nationalism and ideology. The passages set in Cambridge are beautiful. The blending of the personal and the documentary is superbly handled, and the lyrical prose is finely translated. Although the story is told largely through the lives of its extraordinary and pioneering women, Atas? also writes powerfully and convincingly in the male voice. Passionate without being sentimental, The Other Side of the Mountain is a bold and poignant novel, which defines the struggles and ideals of a whole nation.”
- Margaret Drabble

*synopsis for Other Side Of The Mountain acquired from www.bn.com

Synopsis:*

A vital part of modern Turkish literature, Hikmet (1902-1963) was a poet whose lyrics, as sung by leftist performers such as Pete Seeger, had international resonance, and whose repeated imprisonments drew protests from the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. This novel in verse, written during one long prison sentence in the 1940s, reflects the emotional and physical torments the poet experienced. More gritty than lyrical, it is powerfully plainspoken: “But Selim was no Communist. He didn’t even know what communism was …But the cops thought different. They laid Selim on the floor. And when Selim got up, he couldn’t step on his feet. They laid Selim on the floor. And when Selim got up, he couldn’t see.” A revised version of a 1983 abridged Persea edition, this volume disappoints in at least one respect: a facile preface by Edward Hirsch, who states that Hikmet’s “voice is sad and reads like music; it is joyful and sounds like happiness.” Hikmet’s writing is poetry under siege, and the blunt heroism of his characters makes them more Marxist ideals than believable human beings. The poetic element may not survive well in translation, but the content and context make this a lastingly fascinating work. As translator Konuk writes, the book describes “people from different social backgrounds and classes, ranging from the dispossessed and the unemployed to senators and industrialists… from factory workers and peasants to doctors and professors’ wives.” This is recommended for all modern literature collections, as evidence of the indomitable human will toward free speech in spite of great suffering. (May 23) FYI: In celebration of the centennial of Hikmet’s birth, Persea is releasing a revised edition of Poems of Nazim Hikmet simultaneously. Fans of socially committed writing will want both Persea selections, as well as an excellent Anvil Press collection, Beyond the Walls: Selected Poems by Nazim Hikmet. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

*synopsis obtained from bn.com

Synopsis:*

Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force.

Memed—introduced in Kemal’s legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is one of the few truly mythic figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. In They Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal’s novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit’s end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.

*synopsis for The Black Book acquired from www.bn.com

Synopsis:*

Fifteen-year-old Meryem lives in a rural village in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. Her simple, conventional way of life changes dramatically after her uncle, a sheikh in a dervish order, rapes her—and condemns her to death for shaming the family. Asked to carry out the “honor killing” is his son Cemal, a commando in the Turkish army. So begins a long, mystifying voyage for Meryem as her shell-shocked cousin ushers her to the shining metropolis of Istanbul where another troubled soul, the Harvard-educated professor Irfan, embarks on his own journey of transformation—one that catapults him into the heart of Meryem and Cemal’s conflict. The crossed-paths and interwoven destinies of these three characters makes for an affecting, by turns brutal and life-affirming portrayal of traditional and modern-day Turkey that no reader will soon forget.

*synopsis for Bliss acquired from www.bn.com

Synopsis

From a popular and innovative Turkish author, The Messenger Boy Murders is a darkly comic,  irreverent and hypnotic tale, an exploration of humanity’s endless absurdity and its futile attempts to create perfection, cleverly wrapped in a murder mystery.

received from nobleprize.org

Translation from Turkish by Maureen Freely

Half of my book Istanbul is about the city; the other half chronicles the first 22 years of my life. I remember my huge disillusionment when it was finished. Of all the things I had wanted to express about my life, of all the memories that I considered the most crucial, only a few had found their way into the book. I could have written another twenty volumes describing the first twentytwo years of my life, each one drawing from a different set of experiences. It was then that I discovered that autobiographies served not to preserve our pasts, but to help us forget them.

I was born in Istanbul in 1952. My grandfather was a successful civil engineer and businessman who made his fortune building railroads and factories. My father followed in his footsteps, but instead of making money, he kept losing it. I was educated in private schools in Istanbul, and after studying architecture for three years, I dropped out, enrolled in a journalism course, and set out to become a writer. Between the ages of 7 and 22, I dreamed of being a painter. During my childhood and early youth, I painted with a happy and passionate sense of purpose. But by the time I stopped painting at the age of 22, I knew that I had no choice but to devote my life to art. At the same time, I had no idea why I gave up painting at the age of 22 and began to write my first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons. It was to explore that mystery that, years later, I wrote Istanbul.

When I look back on my life up to the age of 54, I see a person who has worked long hours at a desk, in both happiness and in misery. I have written my books with care, patience, and good intentions, believing in each and every one. Success, fame, professional happiness… these did not come to me easily. Today my novels have been translated into 55 languages, but the hardest thing was finding a Turkish publisher for my first novel. It took me four years to find a publisher to take on Cevdet Bey and Sons. This despite the fact that it had won a national prize for unpublished novels …

In 1982 – at about the same time that I published my first novel, I married Aylin Türegün, and because we had both grown up in the same affluent, westernised Istanbul neighbourhood, walking the same streets and – before we ever knew each other – attending the same schools, I used to tease her by saying I had ‘married a girl from my village’. Our daughter was born in 1991, and we named her after Rüya, the heroine of The Black Book.

I have made my living exclusively from writing. Between 1985 and 1988, I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, while my wife was working on her doctorate at the same university. I was greatly impressed by the richness of America’s libraries, bookstores, and museums. My wife and I were divorced in 2002. She and our daughter remain my best friends. In 2006, a month before I won the Nobel Prize, I began to teach at Columbia University for one semester a year.

For me, a good day is a day like any other, when I have written one page well. Except for the hours I spend writing, life seems to me to be flawed, deficient, and senseless. Those who know me well understand how dependent I am on writing, tables, pens, and white paper, but they still urge me to ‘take a bit of time off, do some travelling, enjoy life!’ Those who know me even better understand that my greatest happiness is writing, so they tell me that nothing that keeps me far from writing, paper, and ink will ever do me any good. I am one of those rare happy creatures who have been able to do what they most desired, and who have been able to devote themselves to that task to the exclusion of all else.

I spent my childhood in a large family surrounded by uncles and aunts. My two first novels, Cevdet Bey and Sons, and Silent House, are family sagas. I enjoy describing crowded family gatherings – the meals they eat together, the feuds, and the quarrels. But with the passage of time, as our fortunes dwindled and our family dispersed, it gradually ceased to be a source of protection or a centre to which I felt obliged to return. Every night, when I curl up in bed and pull my quilt over me, I am swept away by a sweet fear that walks between solitude and dreams, the beauties of life, and its cruelties, and it is then that I shiver in the same way I did when I listened to scary stories, or read fairy tales, as a child.

In Silent House, it was through my grandmother’s monologues that I tried to penetrate this world between sleep and wakefulness. There are traces of that same world in The White Castle, which also explores the shadows between dreams and reality, imagination and history. But it was in The Black Book, which I began in 1985, that I felt I found my own voice. I was 33 years old at the time, living in New York, and asking myself hard questions about who I was, and about my history. I spent all my time in my room in the Columbia Library, reading and writing. During my time in New York, my longing for Istanbul mixed in with my fascination for the wonders of Ottoman, Persian, Arab, and Islamic culture. The Black Book was a book that took me a very long time to plan, a book that I wrote without knowing exactly what I was doing, feeling my way forward like a blind man. I am still surprised that I was able to finish it.

The New Life is a lyrical exploration of the thing I first discovered in The Black Book, this time not in Istanbul, but in Anatolia. My Name is Red is the novel that perplexes my mother: she always tells me that she cannot understand how I wrote it …There is nothing in any of my other novels that surprises her; she knows that I drew upon the stuff of my own life. But in My Name is Red there is an aspect that she cannot connect with this son she knows so well, this son about whom she is certain that she knows everything… This must, in my view, be the greatest compliment to any writer can hear: to hear from his mother that his books are wiser than he is.

What has surprised me the most was the popularity of Snow. In the beginning I thought this was down to growing interest in political Islam, the clash of East-West stereotypes and their reflections in everyday life. But now I have come to think that what sets the book apart is what transpires in the Hotel Asia when the political activists are furiously preparing their statements. But in so thinking, I may have again misread my readers’ minds. In the early nineties, when I was known only in Turkey, and Turkish journalists would sometimes ask me in a hostile way why people liked my books, and why I was so widely read, I’d come up with all sorts of reasons that I liked a great deal, but now I don’t believe a single one of them. Later on, when I slowly came to be read all over the world, foreign journalists and literary critics began to ask the same question. I write the books I myself would like to read. And sometimes I take this to mean that everyone in the world shares my feelings. This attempt to explain the popularity of my books is probably as misguided as all the others. Even so, talking about one’s books is as pointless as talking about one’s life. In the end, a writer will see his life as more important than his books. But it is those books that give life its meaning and value. From the age of 22, when I began to write novels, I have never been able to separate my life from my novels. I think that the books I shall write in the future will be thought more entertaining, and more important, than my life. I take this to mean that a person must look ahead to the moment of his death, that he must resign himself to that moment. Despite this, it still seems that there is a lot of time left.

Because as I write these words at the age of 54 in April 2007, I know that my life has long since passed its midpoint, but, having written for thirty-two years now, I believe that I am at the midpoint of my career. I must have another thirty-two years in which to write more books, and to surprise my mother and other readers at least one more time.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-autobio.html