Fiction by Tezer Özlü, translated by Maureen Freely, reviewed by Tigerlily Warner
JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF LIFE (Transit Books)

How glad I am that I brought no books with me on this journey. For a quarter of a century, I’ve been reading, reading, reading, and now, freed of books, I am looking inside myself for words’ traces.

-Tezer Özlü, Journey to the Edge of Life

Do readers lose bits of ourselves when we read? Does a love of books take something from us? Do we learn or gain something in exchange? Does consuming other people’s art change something essential about who we are? These are the questions that Journey to the Edge of Life made me ask.

The book, first published in Turkish in 1983, is out in English for the first time, translated by Maureen Freely.

Drawing heavily on Özlü’s own life, Journey to the Edge of Life is an autofictive novel structured as a travelogue. The story follows an unnamed female writer as she moves erratically across Europe, retracing the steps of the authors who have influenced her life and her writing most profoundly—Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka, and most of all Cesare Pavese. The title references not just the narrator’s own journey through Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Belgrade, but her journey to inhabit the lives of the artists for whom her admiration borders on obsession. The book opens with the narrator’s realization that she was born on the same day as Cesare Pavese (also true of Özlü)  and effectively closes with her haunting visit to the Hotel Roma in Turin, Italy, where he died. The story explores the ways in which the narrator’s almost parasocial connection to this and other authors has molded her being. Her quest—to discover the boundaries of where her own life ends and the art that she consumes begins—resonated deeply with me.

The journey is largely solitary, as is the narrator. She marks time in this otherwise non-linear narrative by describing her various affairs with men across Europe. These encounters lead her to reflect on the institution of marriage and the complicated imposition of sexuality on our lives. Regularly, the men she chooses are much younger than she is, and she often leaves them watching after her on the platform as she abruptly boards a train to a new city. Beyond the affairs, a few brief interactions with passersby, and an extended conversation with Italo Svevo’s daughter, our narrator remains alone. The speaker is less interested in interacting with those around her, and is far more focused on what those interactions imply about society more broadly.  The speaker’s isolation is enhanced by  the way in which her analytical approach to human interaction effectively separates her more from the people whom she interacts with.

Following the success of her 2023 translation of Özlu’s debut novel Cold Nights of Childhood (originally published in 1980), Maureen Freely’s translation of Journey to the Edge of Life presents the Turkish author’s prose with spontaneity and looping, staccato lyricism. The text feels as though it were crafted in a series of concentric circles, each opening into the next as the reader moves further into the story. Broadly, we are exploring the cities that the protagonist wanders through, and within this exploration, we are inhabiting the lives of her literary idols. We are also sharing in her visceral physical experiences—sweaty hotel rooms, hours without sleep, a persistent and painful toothache. At the same time, we tiptoe around the trauma of her childhood and her struggle with mental illness. For instance, the narrator’s obsession with Cesare Pavese’s suicide is inextricably linked to her own suicidal ideations as well as her complex relationship to solitude. It is hard for a reader not to draw connections between her fanatic transience and her fear of returning to Istanbul, stemming from the unnamed but ever-present atrocities of her youth.

Despite the weight of the speaker’s sadness and the pain she experiences throughout the novel, the narrative is punctuated by moments of ecstatic joy. While this can hardly be called a coming-of-age story—especially because the middle-aged narrator seems to consider herself more fluent in the nature of the world than most of the people she encounters—she still experiences intense growth and self-realization.

I didn’t choose the city or the country or the roads, did I. I’m nowhere. I won’t be anywhere. I shall adapt to nothing. In years to come, many thousands of travelers will come to stay at this hotel that looks so much like a space station. I’m just one of many. I’m here, watching the summer clouds wander past. I speak to people. I look out at the hills I’ve so missed. Isn’t every hill my hill. Every patch of earth. Every person. Isn’t every person really me. Don’t we all carry love inside us.

Although Journey to the Edge of Life was written more than forty years ago, Özlu’s observations on the global political climate remain pertinent to contemporary issues. She repeatedly brings up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it was at the time and reflects throughout the narrative on how willingly ignorant the people around her were to war and famine despite their unending willingness to obsess on more trivial matters, like the World Cup.

While reading through this journey, I felt immensely invested in the exploration and insight of the narrator, yet  her character attempts almost no connection with the reader. The speaker’s voice seems to embody a deliberate estrangement;  she actively distances herself from other people. Much of her internality centers around her almost condescending recognition of the differences between herself and everyone else.  Özlü seems not to be attempting to develop a speaker who is relatable to the reader; she is developing a speaker who instead seems to have some amount of disdain towards the reader. While we are with her for 184 pages, we finish the book with almost as much information about the speaker as when we started. She hints at parts of her own life, at a child that may be her own, at past affairs—never more than this. The protagonist serves not for the reader to recognize, but instead as a conduit meant to lead away from our own ways of thinking about life (ways of thinking modeled on the authors whom she loves) and toward Özlü’s. She is not connecting with us; she is convincing us of her beliefs on marriage, politics, writing, and life. And her separation from us is the tool with which she does this.

Like Özlü’s protagonist, I am a reader who tends to project the books I read onto my own life rather than the other way around. Instead of using the meaning she has gathered from her own life to extract insight from what she reads, she sees hidden messages in books and in the lives of her favorite authors; she looks to them to explain her pain, confusion, and loneliness. Her narrator views her most important relationships as those with people she doesn’t know and with stories that are deeply separated from the concrete world. The relevance of Özlü’s prismatic narrative seems hard to miss. Be it her obsessive pull towards literary idols or her compulsive transience in search of something she cannot reach, the story asks us to consider what drives us, what controls us, and what it means to really live our lives.

Tigerlily Warner is beginning her senior year at Reed College. She loves the river, most card games, and some dogs. Tigerlily is a poet and essayist, living in Portland, OR.

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