An exciting translation of a feminist novel that renders a nuanced picture of the conflicting ideologies of 1970s Turkey.
A family dinner party in Adana, Turkey, is interrupted by a police raid, thrusting the lives of all involved into disarray.
This autobiographical novel first published in Turkish in 1975 is divided into three parts. The first section, “The Raid,” describes a dinner party hosted by Ali of Maraş. Ali’s wife, Gülşah, bustles around the kitchen to prepare a fulsome dinner, aided half-heartedly by her sister, Ziynet. Around the dining table are Ali’s two nephews, Hüseyin and Mustafa, who have fought their way out of their working-class backgrounds with their family’s support and become, respectively, a lawyer and a teacher. They are joined by Ziynet’s quiet husband, Zekeriya, and Oya—the sole outsider to the family—a journalist recently released from prison who was invited to dinner by Hüseyin on a whim. Family tensions fueled by political disagreement bubble and almost erupt but are arrested by a raid initiated by rumors that the dinner is a meeting of anarchists. The novel’s second part, “The Interrogation,” follows the attendees of the dinner party who are arrested during the raid. We spend the most time with Oya, who remembers the other women detained with her during her previous stint in prison. The novel also offers glimpses into the psyches of the captors and interrogators. The final section, “Dawn,” describes the consequences of the raid on the morning after. The novel shifts seamlessly between perspectives. The result is a complex portrait of 1970s Turkey that critiques the senseless violence inflicted by autocratic bureaucracy, with attention to the overlapping injustices of class, ethnicity, and gender that pervade and extend beyond the regime. Startling reflections on beauty and freedom are woven throughout.
An exciting translation of a feminist novel that renders a nuanced picture of the conflicting ideologies of 1970s Turkey.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1953861-38-2
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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