The Bridge of the Golden Horn

By Emine Sevgi Ozdamar
Translated by Martin Chalmers
Published by Serpents Tail

Price
£10.99 (US$17.60 approx)

Reviewed by Caterina Scaramelli
Cornucopia 43

Özdamar’s semi-autobiographical masterpieces follow the life of an anonymous Turkish girl from birth to early adulthood. Her polyphonic writing resonates with the many voices of Turkey’s people – from Anatolian villages and the dusty periphery of Ankara, to student circles, Istanbul’s surrealist theatre and the factories of Germany. My Life is a Caravanserai follows a lively, but rather unfortunate family from Istanbul to Bursa, then to Ankara and back to Istanbul. This is a women’s world: the mother, Fatma, nurtures her three children, with the grandmother Ayfle and the “aunties” of the neighbour-hood, while Mustafa, the often unemployed father, recites Orhan Veli and drinks copious rakı, dreaming of building a larger family home. Here is the Turkey of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its political struggles, growing urbanisation, the Korean War, American comic books and the departure of the first wave of workers to Germany. The Anatolian grandparents carry with them their sagas of the war and the nascent Turkish Republic, enriched by wisdom, humour and village folklore.

The author’s wonderful use of local narrative, storytelling, proverbs and prayers, and a prose that moves from the lyrical to gritty humour, re-creates this microcosm of neighbourhoods from a young girl’s intimate perspective. We follow her as she sits in school, visits relatives, dreams, listens to stories and experiments with early passions. Reality merges into mythological visions as, naïve, witty and explorative, she absorbs the colourful world around her.

The first book leaves the girl, now a teenager, on an all-women train from Istanbul to West Berlin, where she will work, intermittently, in a factory. The Bridge of the Golden Horn leaves the visionary storytelling of My Life is a Caravanserai and enters the marginal worlds of Turkish intellectuals and Germany’s urban working class, as our insatiably curious young woman is introduced to theatre, poetry and left-wing politics. Don’t expect the usual migrant story of liminality, identity troubles and assimilation. Never dull or predictable, full of popular wisdom, this is a book that spans wider than you expect. This is much more than an autobiography: peopled by a panoply of characters, it is an affectionate account of Turkey and Germany during the late 1960s, and a tribute to both the movement of people and the flow of ideas.

Life is a Caravanserai:
Has Two Doors - I Came in One - I Went Out the Other

By Emine Sevgi Ozdamar
Translated by Luise von Flotow
Published by Middlesex University Press

Price
£15.99 (US$25.60 approx)

NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM CORNUCOPIA