The Turkish author and translator Tezer Özlü, who died in 1986 at the age of 42, was hungry for life – but found herself frustrated by social mores, patriarchal repression, political authoritarianism, and eventually cancer. That hunger, and that frustration, drive this 1983 novel, which was originally drafted in German – Özlü spent time in Berlin during her peripatetic writerly life, and conjures it gorgeously in prose.
Özlü’s unmoored narrator takes a personal pilgrimage across Europe to visit sites important to the three authors that made her: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo, and her “greatest love” Cesare Pavese.
The style is slippery, frantic, darkly lyrical – seductive. In her dreamlike parade of European cities, abandoned lovers, brooding train trips and existential musings on the desire for total freedom, Özlü’s narrator swerves between self-doubt, self-assertion and self-annihilation.
Might the novel profit from a little less “self”? Or is that wilfulness the point? The narrator reflects, in one moment, that she could not live within the confines of bourgeois life: “Another dimension was called for, though it was not in everyone’s grasp. A way of being that went beyond reason, into something deeper.” Özlü’s novel is a deeply moving record of just that.
- Journey to the End of Life by Tezer Özlü (trans. Maureen Freely) is available from Transit Books, details.
