COLD NIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD

A 25-year-old woman, artistically gifted and mentally unstable, chronicles her childhood in Turkey; her sojourns in Europe; her loves and torments as she repeatedly descends into the underworld of mental institutions and reawakens, almost miraculously, to the fragile beauty of nature and of human connection.

This intensely felt novel—originally published in Turkish in 1980—opens conventionally enough in the 1950s with elegiac scenes of childhood, wonderfully evoked, and a portrait of a provincial Turkish town that seems to materialize before our very eyes. “The boulevard that starts at Saraçhanebaşi goes as far as Edirnekapi,” the narrator writes. “In the middle is a wide footpath bisected by a row of oaks. Red and green trams run along either side.” The family is brilliantly conjured, too. “It’s been seventy years since she last slept with a man,” we learn of one elder. “She loves life. Nothing interests her more than her own funeral.” School days feature nuns that emerge daily, “heads downturned, dark clouds in the dim morning light slipping one by one down the steep stairs into the deeper darkness of the nunnery.” The narrator’s depiction of her descent into mental illness, a recurring affliction, forms the core of a novel that nonetheless defies gravity thanks to the graceful clarity of the author’s epigrammatic style and the omnipresent dark humor. “I shall learn to lie down smiling for electric shock treatment,” she writes of her many hospitalizations. “If I wish to save myself, that is.” And later, she notes that “nights come early to this hospital. But they don’t know how to end. Dawn never comes.” Time and place become unstable here. One moment the narrator is in Berlin or Paris, acquiring a series of lovers who become discarded husbands and recording her sexual experiences with pithy, almost clinical accuracy. Then it’s back to Ankara, where the political upheavals of the 1970s fleetingly penetrate this profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance.

A powerful evocation of mental torment and ecstasy.