Description:
An experimental collection of "proems" from poet and author Leylâ Erbil, the first Turkish woman toever be nominated for the Nobel.
In this remarkable novel-in-verse, a young woman named Lahzen comes of age grappling with a culture gripped by interethnic tension. Bearing witness to the mutilation of a Kurdish journalist, the political imprisonment of her lover, and the violence of the man her widowed mother has taken up with, Lahzen reaches back into the past, searching for the root of this evil.
From the Byzantine Empire to the twentieth-century Turkey of Erbil's experience, What Remains searches urgently for a way to escape these recurrent cycles of suffering, while preserving hope in the smallest acts of kindness. Now available for the first time in translation, with an introduction by Ayten Tartici, What Remains is a fearless, deeply felt collection from one of the most influential Turkish writers in recent history.
Review Quotes:
"Erbil is a chronicler of the cracks, of what disrupts a sense of wholeness and cohesion... At the heart of the book is a dirge for what has been lost in the formation of the Turkish state and its accompanying nationalism." --Asymptote Magazine
"How odd that a writer who first started making her mark in 1956 should remain a pioneer still today . . . How odd that, even after half a century, no writer capable of surpassing her has yet appeared." --Mahmut Temizyürek, poet and literary critic
"Leylâ Erbil is a consummate literary artist." --Turkish National Committee for UNESCO