I Am My Country - And Other Stories

Informationen zum Autor Kenan Orhan Klappentext "Spanning decades and landscapes, from forests along the Black Sea to villages along the Euphrates, from the streets of Istanbul to the mountains bordering Iraq, the stories in this collection probe the lives of ordinary people who confront extraordinary moments of personal reckoning. A determined florist trains a neighborhood stray dog to blow up a corrupt president. A garbagewoman finds discarded instruments--and later, musicians--in the trash and takes them home to form a clandestine orchestra in her attic. A smuggler risks his life to traffic a girl claiming to be pregnant via immaculate conception across the border with Iraq. A baker and her husband approach a breaking point in their marriage when an apocalyptic flood threatens their village. A poor cage-maker learns he can talk to birds, and tries to use this gift to enchant his childhood love in the days leading up to the 1955 Istanbul pogrom"-- Leseprobe The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra Selim the halfwit hoarded everything from the trash—that was the story they told me my first day on the job at the waste management office. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he’d taken up hoarding as a way to fill the hole. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked—small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes—picked out of the top of garbage bins. But the way it goes, everyone said, it’s not long until you’re taking home half the bin, raking through it for treasure and convincing yourself of the value of each thing. How stupid, you say, how stupid of people to discard such beautiful and useful things. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he’d thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead. Then he installed a system of boards and beams into the frame of the house, with maybe two or three inches of clearance from his head, in order to pile trash above him. More and more he took from the waste bins: old tattered books, bicycle bits, apple cores, orange peels, broken printers, smashed-up furniture, crumpled cartons and boxes, hundreds of kilograms of paper, pens, eyeglasses, eggshells, water bottles, shoes with holes, sleeping bags with urine stains, jackets too small, jackets too large, bedframes, filing cabinets, coffee mugs, coffee grounds—on and on, an impossible list of trash weighed down on those boards and beams until at last, while his dreams of finding his wife in all this waste were licking the night sky, the house’s framing broke and the collected works of the city’s refuse crashed down upon Selim the halfwit, killing him not instantaneously, but swiftly enough to confuse Selim into believing in his deliverance. The garbagemen laughed at the end of the story, and then the oldest one, without a hint of jest, indeed with genuine concern, said to me: “And you are doubly at risk, because a woman hoards more than a man.” And the other garbagemen stopped their laughing and nodded solemnly. The nearest to me said: “We make light of a truth; it is easy to find the merits in another’s garbage if only because we hope someone will treat our own legacies with such care.” I smiled and laughed and so did they, and they all went out to their tasks. I found my assignment: a truck helmed by two men named Hamit and Mehmet. I hopped into the cab. The older man, Hamit, drove us off to our route, and as he did Mehmet said that I shouldn’t take anything the others said seriously. “Garbagemen, for who knows why, make up myths and tales more readily than any other profession. Still, it is not good to take from the trash. Once you start, there’s no stopping. Eventually you’ll find yourself buried under it.” A day became a week, became a month, became a year as it happens. Mehmet an...

Product details

• Authors: Kenan Orhan
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.04.2023
• EAN: 9780593449462
• ISBN: 978-0-593-44946-2
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 216 mm x 22 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature