From Publishers Weekly
Death in Troy is a teeming, elliptical examination of repressed homosexuality by popular Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995), his second novel to be translated, by Aron Aji, into English (after Night). Set mostly in the seaside town of Sarikum in the 1940s and '50s, it bounces from narrator to narrator, but focuses mainly on Mushfik Hanim, whose desire is a constant source of confusion for him (and probably for most modern American readers). Central in his life are his fanatically devoted mother, Dilaver, and Suat, the young boy he falls in love with. Sin, madness and guilt are all balanced by flashes of beautiful imagery and poetic language.
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Karasu, one of Turkey's most interesting modern writers (he died in 1995), has written a series of vignettes that tell of a difficult coming-of-age in the middle of the twentieth century, only now being published in English. Mushfik is a young man who encounters all sorts of emotions growing up--a psychologically abusive father, a fawning mother, the restrictions of a rigid society, the love he feels for another boy. He experiences the provincialism of the small coastal town in which he grows up and then the isolation of a big city as his family later moves to Istanbul. The series of vignettes, told from different perspectives and at different points in time, weave together an exploration of the emotional progression of Mushfik's maturation--the time line is not temporal but psychological. The issues covered in this collection of stories--homosexual love, mother-son intimacy, passion between friends, and despair--are all the more fascinating because they are a product of Turkey in the 1950s.
Michael SpinellaCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
