Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Transit Books, 2025
The Turkish writer Tezer Özlü lacks widespread recognition in the Anglosphere, but the tide of her English reception is turning thanks to the efforts of Maureen Freely, the translator of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In her lifetime of 1943-86, Özlü was part of a moment in modern Turkish literary history in which secular women writers proliferated. Though many of them too remain in relative obscurity among English audiences, one can only hope that the publication of Özlü’s novels will set off a domino effect.
In 2022, Deep Vellum released an updated translation (thanks to a joint but asynchronous effort between Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler) of Tuhaf Bir Kadın / A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil—the only Turkish women to be nominated for the Nobel as well as Özlü’s friend, source of influence, and dedicated epistolary correspondent. Originally published in 1971, Tuhaf Bir Kadın is a pioneering force in the genre of Turkish women’s writing, but proved to be a controversial text for its frank exploration of a woman’s sexuality, representation of domestic abuse, and explicit engagement with the political left. Still, it set the stage for a new generation of authors, and its legacy extends into the twenty-first century with novelists like Elif Shafak, who is committed to exposing the deep-rooted misogynistic violence of Turkish patriarchal society. For instance, her 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World narrates the story of a murdered prostitute in Istanbul; the dead woman’s brain continues to function for the length of time in the title, a dirge for the disposability and precarity of women’s lives in the Turkish metropolis.
Women writers in Özlü’s time were also formally innovative, experimenting with autofiction and pushing the boundaries of narrative. In her article of “Turkish Literature” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, the scholar Sibel Erol notes: “Their fracturing representational strategies that shatter a coherent narrative formalistically repeat their questioning of absolutist and unified ‘truths’ and expose reality as contextual.” With such stylistic conventions that constituted the hallmarks of literary modernism, it is not surprising that there are comparisons between the prose of these Turkish writers and that of Virginia Woolf; it was a historically significant time for these literary developments to be taking hold. The Republic of Türkiye was just over two decades old when Özlü was born, and the conditions were ripe for authors interested in questions of national and individual identity, including the place of women in a state distancing itself from religion and inclining itself toward the West.
Istanbul became a cosmopolitan, multicultural hub with a bustling arts scene, and as a young girl, Özlü benefited from this syncretic character of the city, where she moved when she was ten years old. Though her parents were staunchly patriotic republicans, she studied at an Austrian high school. As the country was trying to establish the newly-formed Turkish language as its official mother tongue and suppressing the multilingual remnants of the Ottoman Empire, learning a Western language was considered in line with the burgeoning republic’s aims. As a result of this education, Özlü developed an intimate relationship with the German language throughout her life as reader, writer, and translator. She was also taken with Russian and Italian literature, as well as American writers in Italian translation (she frequently mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald in her personal papers). Her life was thusly defined by journeys: not just her extensive travels as she resisted a fixed sense of home, but a navigation across languages, traditions, and literary landscapes.
Despite her short life, Özlü’s Turkish corpus is robust. It includes two novels, numerous short stories, a screenplay, letters, and diary entries, among other unpublished fragments. Özlü made her English language debut in 2023 with Cold Nights of Childhood (Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri, 1980), translated by Maureen Freely and published by Transit Books. In a past review on Asymptote, Irmak Ertuna Howison called Cold Nights of Childhood “a perpetual coming-of-age,” and the acclaimed Ayşegül Savaş, part of the new generation of Turkish writers, describes Özlü’s prose in her introduction as “consciousness distilled into narrative form”; the novel sees its narrator laying herself bare to the reader, unapologetically recounting her sexual experiences and flâneuse-ing through European capitals while probing the depths of her volatile psychological state. Özlü suffered from severe mental illness and received treatment in psychiatric clinics, and this also forms a large part of this early work. In this regard, it is reminiscent of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces (1968), a novel that candidly chronicles, in the first person, the psychic break of a writer and mother who finds herself forcibly committed. Like Özlü, Ditlevsen shared the experiences of her fictional protagonist; the latter took her own life four years before the former was born. Both writers question the transgressive possibilities that “madness” affords, considering it as a passage towards independence in a patriarchal world that otherwise condemns creative, unconventional women through suffering and imprisonment.
In a letter to Leylâ Erbil, Özlü says that she aims to represent “the subjectivity of a woman in its entirety” in her books. There is then a tendency among English readers of her work to label her a feminist, but she did not identify as such; in fact, she addressed this very subject in an essay entitled “Kadınlarımız” (Our Women): “For Turkish people there is no ‘women’s problem’ or feminism in the western sense. The problems of Turkish women will be addressed within all of Turkey’s problems.” Challenging the universal application of an essentializing conception of feminism, she detailed the unique situation of women in Türkiye, seeing women’s liberation not as a separate issue but as rooted in larger oppressive systems and structures.
Journey to the Edge of Life, published in April of this year, is the second of Özlü’s works to be translated into English. While it bears traces of the first novel (the phrase “cold nights of childhood” even appears more than once), it has a distinct premise. Our once-again unnamed narrator travels by train across Europe to the burial places and death sites of her literary heroes: Franz Kafka in Prague, Italo Svevo in a rural town in northern Italy, and her cherished favourite, Cesare Pavese, in Turin. While Cold Nights of Childhood starts with an oppressive domestic scene in the family home, Journey to the Edge of Life begins with discovering a feeling of home through a biography of Pavese. In a letter to Leylâ Erbil published in a Turkish collection of her correspondence, Özlü notes that she is re-reading his diary in German: “I derive immense pleasure from every sentence.” For our wandering narrator, then, home is not bound to any fixed place, but emerges from the pages of the books she reads: “I trust in literature, my true home.” Upon learning that she shares a birthday with Pavese, give or take a time zone, the narrator feels an immediate kinship with him—though this relation with the Italian writer is also fraught, given that he died by suicide in 1950. Evoking the handwritten quotations from Pavese she has pasted on the walls of her hotel room in Berlin, she remarks, “his suicide is here with me.” As she travels closer to the location of his death, the question becomes whether the ends of both the book and the narrator’s life will coincide.
The history of the novel’s composition reveals that the answer underwent a transformation for Özlü. She originally wrote the novel in German with the title Auf dem Spur eines Selbstmords (On the Trail of a Suicide), and later re-wrote it in Turkish as Yaşamın Ucuna Yolculuk. In her translator’s introduction, Maureen Freely points out that the new title “took the emphasis away from Pavese’s death and returned it to her own urgent will to live.” The Turkish word uç denotes the edge of something rather than its end, a sense of approaching right up to the precipice. When the narrator discovers where to find Kafka’s grave, she begins to feel further away from death than ever:
Never has the end of life seemed more distant. Until this moment, I’ve seen the end of life in every face, every breath, every growing child or aging woman, every embrace and morning. Even as a child, in the wheat fields, in the summer moonlight, in the darkest depths of night, I saw the end of life, but when I moved away from all that, when I began to travel on foot or by train through towns and villages and fields and vast landscapes, past mountain ranges and along the shores of lakes, rivers, and endless gray seas, watching people I knew nothing about recede into the distance, my every image of them more distant, until they vanished altogether—only then did I move away from the end of life.
This is a novel of simultaneous journeys outward and inward, through space and time, and also through memory and literature—all of it transformative, revelatory. The narrator reflects, “Journeys are so interesting. They cut away from the flow of life to take their own shape.” In Özlü’s literary landscape, one travels without ever arriving. A destination is not an end point, but an edge on which to rest that becomes a new beginning.
From the opening pages of the novel, geographical and temporal borders dissolve. The narrator is in Genoa but also Galata; she has just discovered Pavese but has also read him all her life. Almost out of a sense of frustration, she expresses her impulse to recollect: “I return to past journeys. To the images I brought back with me. I cannot stop.” This involves more than just a slideshow of impressions playing in her mind; Özlü is demonstrating how memory relentlessly interweaves itself into our present experience and mediates our relationship to places and people. When we are “here,” we are always, even if only in an imaginative capacity, “there” too. “Life is timeless,” she writes when reflecting on the incessant continuum between past, present, and future, with the result that everything is contained in the now, and therefore new. Memory is not just an echo or regard of the past. In one of her diary entries, Özlü articulates the slippage that occurs between now and then: “I observed the moments I lived becoming memories as I lived them, and then I would memorialize them while I was living them.” To memorialize is to try to preserve something as present when it risks slipping into the void, but our narrator also claims that “all memories are dead,” framing recollection as a kind of conjuring trick. She later considers, “is every moment weighed down with the memories we carry with us.” Özlü’s fictional world collapses distinctions that suggest linearity. If memory is a burden, and if each moment is constantly being translated into memory, then our existential condition is defined by a certain heaviness.
Throughout the book, the narrator interweaves her experiences and musings with the words and lives of the dead writers she admires. She includes forty-one quotations purportedly from Pavese, though Maureen Freely relates a case of translation broken telephone; those Özlü included in the German manuscript are translations from his original Italian, and in the Turkish manuscript, translations of the German appear in Turkish. She does not cite all of her sources, and at least one of the quotations is from his biography rather than a work of his. The result is impressionistic, almost as if reading her diary: Pavese mediated entirely through her reading mind. Similar in spirit is Valeria Luiselli’s Papeles falsos from 2010, translated by Christina MacSweeney as Sidewalks in 2014. In the first section, the author searches for the tomb of Joseph Brodsky in San Michele Cemetery in Venice, interspersing her prose with the names and dates of others who are buried there—an act of memorialization powered by discovery. Özlü’s narrator would appreciate Luiselli’s insight that “a dead person is always more agreeable than a living one.”
Journey to the Edge of Life is a novelistic contemplation on a relationship between life and death that is not binaristic, but dialectical. As John Berger expressed in “On the Economy of the Dead”: “the dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead.” For Özlü, these two terms do not stand in contradiction, but can each only be understood via the other. The narrator insists that she has only learned how to live as a result of her engagement with the dead: “Throughout my life it has been from the dead I’ve drawn my courage. The dead in whose stories I have lived. The dead who succeeded in turning this world of damnation into one where it became possible to live.” She walks hand in hand with those who have come before her, and this proximity gives her a deeper understanding of and appreciation for life. It also resuscitates and revitalizes the writers who have sustained her—an act of reciprocity. In a posthumously published collection of her miscellaneous writings called Kalanlar (translatable as “Remains”—a loaded title), Özlü says that “every life is adorned with a little death. To live is to face this difficult truth.” How to live with death but continue to affirm life—this is the task the novel presents.
In the same piece published in Kalanlar, Özlü observes: “the greatest happiness I’ve experienced has always been adorned with pain.” This dynamic between pleasure and pain asserts itself in Journey to the Edge of Life as an imperative that “suffering and happiness must be one and the same.” Her outlook on the world is a Heraclitean unity of opposites, “brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict,” to quote the ancient philosopher directly. There is certainly a great deal of pain in Özlü’s novel; on a physical level, she suffers from a persistent toothache and frequent headaches, but there is also psychic pain. Due to her commitment to living on her own terms, she is a social outcast: “lacking as I do a steady job or proper place to live, I have no place in the ‘civilized’ world.” The narrator feels profound loneliness and alienation, world-weariness, existential dread. “Are we not always alone,” she wonders even in moments of intimacy, but later maintains that “the most important task . . . is never to stop resisting loneliness.” Taking a series of lovers of various ages is one of her modes of resistance, but she also confesses: “I have never wanted to give all my love to a single person.” Instead, she opts for “life’s most precious gift: our desire to be with others, skin to skin.” For our narrator, union entails separation, and a relationship contains its own end within itself, just as a seed contains within it the full story of a flower, from its first bloom to its inevitable withering. In another piece from Kalanlar, Özlü identifies the very act of writing as stemming from a crossover between boundaries: “When pain is too great to be held back from the border between life and death, when life can no longer sustain us—that is where literature begins, is it not.” Literature, for her, is a tendril of pleasure on the vine of pain.
Özlü freely alternates between pronouns in her prose. “I” is naturally dominant given the structure of the novel as an exploration of a single woman making her way in the world, but “we” appears with some regularity. This is a clever choice for a work of autofiction, in which the “I” of the narrative persona and the “I” of the author’s lived experience intersect. Even more frequent is the use of “you,” a disarming address that implicates the reader, rendering one of the novel’s central subjects as the lack of connection and communication among people, and the supremacy of the individual to the point of narcissism or even solipsism:
No two people speak the same language. You understand now that whatever anyone says, they are saying it to themselves. Their every word is in some way an affirmation of self. Even if you’re genuinely trying to explain something to someone, you can do no more than express your own view of the world, extol your own wisdom. Every hand that reaches out to caress someone else’s body will move across that body as if wishing to caress its own.
The problem here is not incoherence, as in Wittgenstein’s conception of a “private language” that is intelligible only to the speaker, but a refusal to share the world with others. As the narrator contemplates the evocative power of Berlin, she thinks about how people have become cut off from each other, how they their own deaths: “Are not the selves we parade in the streets all false . . . are we most ourselves behind the walls. Is it not behind walls that we can best resist the outside world. Put our ears to the wall and listen . . . every wall oppresses.” There is a marked ambivalence here: barriers let us express ourselves naturally, but only in isolation. Özlü was hemmed in by many such walls throughout her life: her childhood home, school, hospitals, hotel rooms. Perhaps memory too serves as a kind of wall for her—one that necessarily protects as much as it cloisters, both affording freedom and compromising it.
Toward the end of the novel, as the narrator finally reaches the hotel room in which Pavese took his own life, her identity threatens to merge with her literary hero: “the distance between us closes. He wraps his being around mine. My life in time, and forever. His suicide eternal. And I, in its eternal embrace.” But having stared into the darkness of his act, having reached the end of his life and the edge of hers, she feels a sense of liberation, resolving to leave Turin and escape the death that haunts the city. In making this decision, she experiences, for the first time, a sense of unity within herself: “I can feel the two warring sides inside me merge into one.”
The book concludes with this resolve to continue living, but the great tragedy of Tezer Özlü’s life is her untimely death from breast cancer shortly after the publication of this novel in Turkish. It was the culmination of a lifetime spent living and writing fearlessly, producing novels that unsettle, challenge, and ultimately inspire her readers. Early in Journey to the Edge of Life, the narrator refutes the idea of writing as entertainment: “You don’t write to tell stories. The world is full of stories. Every person’s living day is filled to the brim with them.” Above all, Özlü is not concerned with perpetuating the plots we narrate to ourselves and others, and instead she offers us a window into a mind struggling to come to terms with a world that often feels hopeless and empty, that provides no satisfaction, and that offers only what is dead as consolation. Later in the book, the narrator asserts a potential alternative: “My aim in this life is to change how people relate to each other.” If such a desire in any way mirrors Özlü’s own ambitions, then this newest publication is another step towards honoring that legacy.
Hilary Ilkay is an Associate Fellow in the Early Modern Studies Program at the University of King’s College. She is a Managing Editor for the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Journal and an Assistant Managing Editor for Asymptote.
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