An unsettling study of a mind, steeped in violence, dropping off the edge of reason.
Turkish writer Atilgan's classic 1973 novel about alienation, obsession, and precipitous decline, nimbly translated by Stark.
Zeberjet is the owner of the Motherland Hotel, formerly his ancestral home in Izmir, Turkey. Defined less by his nebulous personality than the invariable order of his days, he rises at 6 a.m., takes tea with one lump at 7, visits the barber every four weeks, the public bath every six months, and violates the hotel's charwoman on a near-nightly basis—until the night an alluring woman from Ankara stops in on the way to her village. Though her stay is brief and the conversation minimal, Zeberjet's obsession takes hold while he keeps her room just as she left it and visits nightly, the details of their interaction repeatedly intruding on his thoughts. When he accidentally drops and shatters her teacup, he believes all chance of her returning destroyed along with it, leaving him free to plummet into complete debasement. Later, enraged at his own impotence, Zeberjet murders the charwoman, along with her cat, whereafter he dreams of being put on trial, not for the murder of his employee, but her pet, as his attorney winks, putting a tidy point on the treatment of women all around him. As his life narrows to exclude all but compulsion and dissimulation, he wafts through town as we slip in and out of his turbulent stream-of-consciousness, snippets of conversation drifting in and sticking to his jumbled thoughts, mixing with memory, fantasy, and family history. Everywhere he goes, Zeberjet encounters another crime, in fact or in retelling, recent or ancient, woven into the very fabric that makes up his world, and is "embarrassed, ashamed actually, before all those people who thought of themselves as innocent, who failed to realize that only crime—some kind of crime—could keep you alive on this earth."
An unsettling study of a mind, steeped in violence, dropping off the edge of reason.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87286-711-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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