Lady Life

Informationen zum Autor Ahmet Altan , born in 1950, is one of Turkey’s most important writers. In the purge following the failed coup in July 2016, Altan was sent to prison pending trial for giving “subliminal messages” in support of overthrowing the government. In February 2018 he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Fifty-one Nobel laureates signed an open letter to President Erdogan calling for Altan’s release. His memoir I Will Never See the World Again was published by Other Press in 2019. Altan was released from prison in April 2021.   Yasemin Çongar is the cofounder and director of P24, a not-for profit platform for independent journalism in Istanbul. She is also the founder of K24 , a Turkish literary review, and of the Istanbul Literature House. An editor, essayist and translator, Çongar is the author of four books in Turkish. Klappentext "First published in Turkey in 2021 as Hayat Hanim"--Title page verso. Leseprobe 1   Lives were changing overnight. Everything was so rotten that people’s roots in the past could no longer hold their present-day existence firmly in place. Like ducks in a shooting gallery, everyone lived with the possibility of being knocked over and disappearing with a single shot. My own life changed overnight. Or rather, my father’s life. As a result of events that didn’t make much sense to me, a major country announced that it would be stopping the import of tomatoes, and just like that thousands of acres of land turned into a scarlet-colored dump. My father, with the foolhardiness one sometimes sees in people who resent their work, had invested all his money in a single crop, and so one sentence was enough to knock him over and drive him bankrupt. In the morning of a troubled night my father had a stroke. We had fallen so hard that we couldn’t even find the time to mourn him. As if suffering from a severe case of vertigo, we were able to see everything around us, including his death, but were unable to make any sense of it. A life we had thought would never change crumbled with a terrifying ease. We were free-falling in an unfamiliar void, and I didn’t know what I was falling toward. That I would find out later. We were left with the money in my mother’s bank account and the one-acre flower greenhouse my father had bought for her amusement. “I will find a way to keep you at school, but gone are the days of luxury,” she said. Studying literature on that vast, luminous campus had in fact become a luxury, but she wouldn’t even hear of me dropping out. My poor father had wanted me to become an agricultural engineer, but I insisted on majoring in literature. I suppose what determined my decision, as much as my fondness for the adventurous solitude within a fortress of novels, was my confidence that no choice could jeopardize my secure future life. A week after my father’s funeral I took the bus back to the city where my university was. The next morning I applied for student aid. I was a good student. They agreed to give me a scholarship. Even so, I would no longer be able to pay the rent on the spacious three-bedroom house I shared with a friend. I found a room for rent on a street of dive bars where my schoolmates and I used to hang out. The room was in a six-story building from the nineteenth century, with purple wisteria covering its facade and small balconies with ornamental black wrought-iron railings. A wooden elevator still stood in its antique cage, but it didn’t work. The place must have been built as a han ; now it was used as a boardinghouse they rented out room by room. Before I moved in, I put aside a few things to wear and, in a senseless act of fury, as if I was taking revenge for what had happened to us, sold all my clothes and books, my mobile phone, and computer to junk dealers at a very cheap price. In the room there was a bed with a brass headboard, an old-style wooden...

Product details

• Authors: Ahmet Altan, Yasemin Çongar
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.03.2023
• EAN: 9781635422887
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-288-7
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 202 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature