László Krasznahorkai’s Direnişin Melankolisi, described as “the comedy of the apocalypse”; Ernaux’s Kızın Hikâyesi on the sociality and universality of the personal and the intimate; Can Kozanoğlu and Mirgün Cabas’s İlk Sayfası, a resource to help budding writers chart their own course; Yevgeni Zamyatin’s novel Biz, which has become a touchstone of dystopian literature, and many more will be published by Can Yayınları in 2023 November.
László Krasznahorkai / Direnişin Melankolisi (Translation: Leyla Önal)
Krasznahorkai, one of the most important living Hungarian writers, stands out with the stylistic characteristics of his works. The author’s Direnişin Melankolisi, described as an “apocalyptic farce”, is centred around a mysterious circus that comes to a provincial town. The circus’s only show, a gigantic whale, pits the townspeople against each other and paves the way to dictatorship for the high-minded Mrs Eszter.
Kingsley Amis / Değişim (Translation: Püren Özgören)
The year is 1976, in an England where Prince Arthur never died, so Henry VII never ascended the throne, and the Reformation, Protestantism and the Industrial Revolution never happened. But the pope and the clergy, desirous of preserving the arts to emphasise the glory of God, have plans to preserve the beauty of Hubert’s voice.
Annie Ernaux / Kızın Hikâyesi (Translation: Siren İdemen)
Summer 1958. Eighteen-year-old Annie Duchesne leaves her family, who run a small café-grocery store and embarrass her with their existence, to work as an instructor at a summer camp. For the first time she is alone and free. Among the sophisticated French youth, she is a young girl who longs to be like them, to feel like them. Soon, after her first night with the head instructor at the camp, she surrenders her will to his and finds herself crushed by the will and desire of another.
Ágota Kristóf / Önemi Yok (Translation: Feyza Zaim)
A man turns into a sculpture while hugging his dog for the last time. A woman cannot make sense of her husband falling to his death on the axe on the floor while he was sleeping. The poison of madness, despair, loneliness, homelessness invades every particle of life.
Ágota Kristóf / Okumaz Yazmaz (Translation: Feyza Zaim)
In Switzerland, where Ágota Kristóf settled as an asylum seeker at the age of twenty-one with her baby and husband, she was introduced to a hostile language that she could never fully master, that she could never make her own, that she could neither write nor read. Henceforth, she cannot feel herself a part of a people and carries the feeling of otherness within her at all times.
Can Kozanoğlu-Mirgün Cabas- / İlk Sayfası
Can Kozanoğlu and Mirgün Cabas ask important names of our literature how they write the “first page” of their books! The pleasant conversations that start with this question turn into a writing workshop where the authors share their different and valuable writing experiences. Twenty-five important authors share their writing styles, habits, obsessions, new projects, thoughts on literature, concerns and hopes for the world and humanity with great generosity.
Lûgat365 / Bazı Tabirler Çok Güzel
This time, Lûgat365 comes with 365 expressions that entered our language in different periods of Turkish, rich in both pronunciation and meaning.
Jorge Luis Borges / Evaristo Carriego (Translation: Peral Bayaz)
“I am convinced that the name of Evaristo Carriego will henceforth take its place in the ecclesia visibilis of Argentine literature, and that all the prestigious institutions of our literature – rhetoric courses, anthologies, national literary history – will not be able to avoid mentioning it. And I am also convinced that it will not be the sad cries of his work that will earn him this honourable membership. It is these arguments that I have aimed to substantiate here.”
Yevgeni Zamyatin / Biz (Translation: Eyüp Karakuş)
The One State government, where people are uniformly dressed, referred to by numbers instead of names, and where even their passions have to live according to a certain timetable in their lives consisting of work, is building a spacecraft to reach other planets. D-503, the chief engineer of this spacecraft named Integral, starts to write a diary by taking some notes and keeping records during this project.
This Month in Classics
Joseph von Eichendorff / Bir Aylağın Hayatından (Translation: Bilge Uğurlar – Türkis Noyan)
A young man who does not want to live his life in narrow moulds cannot resist his wanderlust. He is seduced by the seductiveness of distant lands; he prefers to go to Italy rather than work in his father’s mill. He takes his violin and sets off, leaving his home and everything he knows. His intention is to find his place in the world.
George ve Weedon Grossmith / Önemsiz Bir Adamın Günlüğü (Translation: Kaya Genç)
Charles Pooter lives an ordinary, if boring, life with his family in a London suburb; he reads nothing but The Daily Telegraph and lacks the courage and open-mindedness to change his stereotypical thoughts. Unlike other works with similar social criticisms, the Grossmith brothers endear this character to the reader. Everyday events such as gardening, housework, and what goes on in the company where he works are all important issues in Pooter’s small world.
