The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales

by Ferit Edgü, Aron Aji (Translator)

The Wounded Age begins with a conversation between an unnamed couple, referred to as the Man and the Woman: “I’m leaving soon, he says. / Where, she asks. / East. The mountains.” We are given no names, barely any punctuation, just the barest trail of dialogue set as verse: this is the spare style and austere language of the canonical Turkish author Ferit Edgü, a master of distillation. In the two books paired here and translated into English for the first time, Edgü represents complex social and political realities with startling lyricism and economy. The Wounded Age features a newspaper reporter, assigned to write about ethno-national violence in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey. Like the narrators in Eastern Tales who are teachers and writers from Istanbul, he is a stranger in a region that both confounds and attracts; language in this place, especially his own language, cannot be trusted.

In the unsettled and desperate atmosphere of “the East,” a buried and unspoken history of violence carries over uninterrupted into the present. Each tale of death, dispossession, and exile echoes catastrophes in the past, forming an increasingly resonant ledger of a tragic history. The state’s denial and justification of violence against its ethnic communities—the genocide of the Armenians and massacres of the Greeks and Assyrians in the last century—carries over into its continuing subjugation of the Kurds, and ongoing internecine warfare along the border. In the story “Interview” in Eastern Tales, an old villager tells the narrator, “Make our photograph,” and adds, “send us the pictures. No need to write letters.” The minimal tales Edgu tells are vivid pictures of life in the East—a house in ruins, an empty crib, wolves howling on the hills, human corpses—and transcriptions of living voices. The reporter in The Wounded Age has no illusions that his story will stop the bloodletting; instead, he goes east because he knows he must open his eyes and unstop his ears.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Turkish Literature, Turkish, Short Stories

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 10, 2023

About the author

1936’da İstanbul’da doğdu. İstanbul Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Resim Bölümü’nde başladığı öğrenimini Paris’te sürdürdü. 1976-1990 yılları arasında, kurucusu olduğu Ada Yayınları’nda, çağdaş Türk ve dünya yazarlarının, şairlerinin yapıtlarını yayınladı. Edebiyatın çeşitli alanlarında onlarca ürün verdi. "Bir Gemide" adlı kitabıyla 1979 Sait Faik Armağanı, "Ders Notları" ile 1979 Türk Dil Kurumu Ödülü, "Eylülün Gölgesinde Bir Yazdı" ile 1988 Sedat Simavi Edebiyat Ödülü’nü aldı. Abidin Dino, Yüksel Arslan, Bedri Rahmi, Eren Eyüboğlu, Füreya, Aliye Berger, Ergin İnan gibi sanatçılar üzerine yayınlanmış kitapları vardır.

Reviews

[Tony]

There were hints that this would be about the Turkish subjugation of the Kurds, something I know ashamedly nothing about beyond this sentence I'm just writing. Which was my point in reading this, partly. But I found no specifics here. Instead, I found:

The Wounded Age: The longest work here. Structurally 75 pages or so of one-page poem-looking writing. Sometimes they read like poems; sometimes not. Again, no specifics, but sometimes beautiful, haunting images. Yes, that's it. They are poems about images:

Since I couldn't photograph the questioner, I'll photograph the questions, I said to myself. And so I did.
I photographed the empty hills. I photographed the burned-down village. I photographed the wolves howling on the hills in the middle of the day.

I entered the house in ruins and photographed the empty crib.

So maybe there were specifics. Two words: empty crib

Images. Take my picture, they say.

____ ____ ____

We all read in sequence; there's no other way. The luckiest of us, though, are visited by the reading gods and discern a plan. Not ours. Theirs.

I started an unlikely four-book journey with God's Country, an ironically titled book of satire, exposing America's historic racism. I then visited the Devil in the English Landscape, and how Death, his very self, came to a small village. Then here, to southeastern Turkey.

There was Death here, too:

If time doesn't exist here, what does? the hunter asked, his jaw trembling.
The guide replied without a moment's hesitation.
Only death. Would you say death knows time?
I don't know, the hunter said.
I'll tell you, the hunter said. It doesn't

So there was Death in God's Country, a death that doesn't die. Followed by a folk-lorish tale of Good versus Evil, personified. I felt the Devil when Death came to the village of Dodder. But I learned it's not the Devil that brings Death. And then to that spot of Turkey: This here is God's Mountain. God's lands. God's Country.

____ ____ ____

Places: America's past (past?); a sluice of cascading rocks; a village of privilege, and not privilege; an empty crib.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turkish writer Ferit Edgü is quoted in the Translator's Afterword saying: "I want nothing superfluous in my writing. Texts cleansed of details; the event giving rise to the story distilled to its concisest form." The two texts collected in this volume The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales are spare, unadorned, often appearing as a kind of prose poem, each sentence appearing on a new line. Both draw on the author's experience as a teacher in the impoverished southeastern corner of Turkey as a young teacher, a harsh, isolated area marked by conflict between soldiers and the autonomous Kurdish population which reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but still continues to this day. The first text is a novella that tells of a journalist sent from Istanbul to cover the violence in the region—it paints a tragic portrait as the narrator interacts with the people he meets through his translator and guide. The second (and earlier in terms of publication date) is a collection of short stories and minimalist or micro fictions, again featuring an outsider, typically a teacher, who has come to the area for a time. These stark tales are very powerful.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2024/04/13/he...

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected to like this book, but I must have liked it a lot more than I anticipated because my experience came as a surprise. I loved Edgü’s stark, terse prose, his stripped-down style. The translator Aaron Aji, in his afterword, quotes Edgü:

‘I want nothing superfluous in my writing. Texts cleansed of details; the event giving rise to the story distilled to its concis-est form... I’ve tried to do away with narration, fictionalization, similes and metaphors... I cannot stand metaphorization... [or] descriptions built with ornate words, long, unbearable sentences that serve as signs of an author’s mastery... Just as we have freed writing from psychology, we must free it from metaphors and similes (nothing resembles anything else).’

This determination, the aversion to anything extraneous, speaks to me. If you know anything about me as a reader you must know how much I love and connect with brevity, clarity and sharpness. (God knows I mention it enough!) The stories could be read as poems, and with the way the staccato sentences look on the page, they kinda look like poems too.

And the content? So deeply felt, so moving. My bookseller colleague and I have a shorthand when it comes to contrasting the kinds of fiction books we deal with: there’s writing that feels necessary and “real”, in which the author’s energy communicates—regardless of whether the narrative is autobiographical or not—an energy that tells you the writer had to write this thing. And then there’s everything else.

This book belongs in the first category. It was beautiful, I loved its austerity and its heart.

Fellow translator Ralph Hubbell said: ‘There are roughly 90 million Turkish speakers on this planet, and yet the literature remains so confined to its own language that a translator can reach blindfolded into its vast canonical sea and come up with enough masterpieces to have full-time work for the next 10 years. English/Turkish-speaking writers, take note.’

Yeah, I’d be super grateful if more of them do take note. I’d love to keep reading Turkish fic.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prob a 4 with context. Not his fault

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ferit Edgü's style is very spare and precise, and he limits his vocabulary and structuring to brief photographic visions of memory and experience; indeed they are 'maps of personal memory captured by freeze-frame photography'. This is a style of prose that is entirely new to me and was an experience to savour long after I have completed these two 'elemental' texts by one of Turkey's most celebrated modern writers. The translator marks in his afterword that 'Edgü’s stories are “elemental,” without extraneous exposition, relying instead on voice, point of view, and tone to convey narrative energy, to express as much as possible in the sparest of styles.' Indeed they are more like brief passages of 'proto-prose poems' or sundry 'flashes of fiction' that try to convey the essence of memory and human experience in the leanest and sparest of prose fiction. This is fiction that is closest to painting and photography as possible.

In the writer's own assessment of his writing approach:
'I want nothing superfluous in my writing. Texts cleansed of details; the event giving rise to the story distilled to its concisest form. . . . I’ve tried to do away with narration, fictionalization, similes and metaphors. . . . I cannot stand metaphorization . . . [or] descriptions built with ornate words, long, unbearable sentences that serve as signs of an author’s mastery. . . . Just as we have freed writing from psychology, we must free it from metaphors and similes (nothing resembles anything else).

This is writing that breathes in a new style of prose fiction that is more akin to verse or photographic realization.

And to top it all I had a couple of Turkish literature books to read including Pamuk's new work and another by the great Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. I used to study Turkish language and was able to read it to some extent particularly at a low-intermediate level. I gave up studying it a few years back. But right now my interest has been spurred and I aim to explore more of Turkish literature. And I would love to read more of this great writer in Turkish.

[Rambling Raconteur · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://youtu.be/DIpUJOnPlKE

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edgü’s style is so spare, cold, yet evocative and melancholic. It’s a poetic style I’d love to be able to replicate someday. The stories’ tone contributed to the spare landscapes and slowly violent stories featured in the book. Perhaps more than the style, though, I loved this book’s ethical questions. What does it mean to witness atrocity as an outsider, especially an outsider who belongs to the group of oppressors? And can one ever truly become ‘one of them’ as the speaker claims he has in the last line of the book? From an ecological perspective, what are the ethics of the speaker’s focus on the landscape as a representation of the Kurds? There’s so much in this spare, gorgeous book that I will be returning to again and again (hopefully in Türkçe next time!).

[Isabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-instancing like a poem, like a photo. Experience subsumed in memory.

“I looked at the mountains, the sharp cliffs, the peaks covered with clouds. I suddenly felt a cold wind. In my marrow.”

[penelope marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

He’s FREAKING AWESOME!!!!! And cold and wet and a lot of cigarettes were smoked.

[Pashu · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a particular kind of literary restraint that says more through omission than accumulation ever could. Ferit Edgü has spent a lifetime practicing this art, and in the two texts gathered by NYRB Classics — The Wounded Age (2007) and Eastern Tales (1995), translated into English for the first time by Aron Aji — that restraint becomes both the method and the message.

Form as Ethics

Edgü himself stated plainly what he was after: "I want nothing superfluous in my writing. Texts cleansed of details; the event giving rise to the story distilled to its concisest form." This is not only aesthetic preference — it is a political and moral stance. The words on the page are free to breathe, surrounded by empty space. In a region where official narratives have long crowded out the voices of the people who actually live there, the white space around Edgü's sentences functions as a refusal: a refusal to dress up suffering, to aestheticize it past recognition, or to let the machinery of literary style drown out the human sound underneath.

The Wounded Age opens with the barest imaginable exchange — a conversation between an unnamed couple referred to only as the Man and the Woman: "I'm leaving soon, he says. / Where, she asks. / East. The mountains." No names. No punctuation to soften or organise. Just departure, and a direction. It is an arresting beginning because it refuses comfort before a word of the story has properly begun.

The Stranger Who Witnesses

The Wounded Age features a newspaper reporter from Istanbul, assigned to write about ethno-national violence in the mountains of eastern Turkey. He arrives as an outsider — educated, urban, Turkish in a way that marks him as separate from those he has come to observe — and the book is acutely aware of the ethical burden this position carries. The narrator longs to tangibly help those he meets, but knows he is relegated only to tell their story. He relies almost entirely on his interpreter, Vahap, to provide any window into the lives around him, and even that window is partial, distorted, uncertain.

The novella's inspiration was apparently the Halabja Massacre of March 16, 1988, when Iraqi troops attacked the Kurdish town with chemical weapons, killing up to 5,000 residents; as survivors tried to flee over the border into Turkey, they were blocked by the army. Edgü had wanted to cover the crisis directly but was prevented by his editors. The Wounded Age is, in some sense, the story he was never allowed to file — transformed by time and form into something that outlasts any newspaper report could.

The genius of the narrator's position is that it mirrors the reader's own. We too are outsiders. We too are dependent on mediation and translation. The reporter has no illusions that his story will stop the bloodletting; he goes east because he knows he must open his eyes and unstop his ears. This is a modest but deeply serious ethics of witness — presence without pretension, testimony without the fantasy that testimony alone heals anything.

A Buried History That Won't Stay Buried

What gives both texts their cumulative power is the way they position the Kurdish present within a longer arc of state violence. A buried history — the state's violence against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians — continues uninterrupted in the subjugation of the Kurds. Edgü does not argue this history; he inhabits it. Each tale of death, dispossession, and exile echoes catastrophes in the past, forming an increasingly resonant ledger of a tragic history. The region becomes a palimpsest, each layer of suffering legible through the one above it.

Language itself is destabilized within this history. Language in this place, especially the language of outsiders, cannot be trusted. The villager in "Interview" who asks the narrator to "make our photograph" and then adds, "send us the pictures — no need to write us letters," has an almost devastating instinct about the uselessness of words from the centre. Images might communicate; letters won't. The gap between the narrator's language and the village's reality is not a translation problem. It is a power problem.

Eastern Tales and the Weight of the Mountain

Where The Wounded Age emphasizes and embodies the experience of being in the mountains, Eastern Tales carries the heaviness that the idea of a mountain conveys. The collection draws from Edgü's own time as a young teacher in Hakkari in the early 1960s, assigned in lieu of military service to a nine-month teaching post in a village so remote it could only be reached on foot or by horseback. That biographical origin is felt throughout: the narrator of these tales has skin in the game in a way the journalist of The Wounded Age cannot quite claim.

The stories are reminiscent of Chekhov and Kafka — Chekhov in their close attention to ordinary lives and the dignity extended to people who are otherwise invisible to literature, Kafka in the low-grade institutional menace that surrounds every interaction between the narrator and any representative of state authority. But Edgü's landscape is more extreme than either predecessor, and the fatalism of his villagers has an almost geological quality. Life in this corner of the world is hard, but it is met by its inhabitants with a stoic fatalism that is well honoured through the sharp focus and stark beauty of Edgü's prose.

What the Silence Holds

What is ultimately most striking about this collection — and what elevates it beyond bearing witness to a specific political crisis — is its insistence on the full humanity of people who have been treated, historically, as problems to be solved or erased. The wolves in the hills, the empty crib, the woman stirring a cauldron with a child coming, naming her baby Ferman — "decree," the name given to children born in exile — these images accumulate into something that no official report could contain.

Edgü cuts to the heart of the matter, evoking powerful emotions with few words. The thinness of the prose — sentences that barely take up a line, white space everywhere — is not minimalism for its own sake. It is the formal equivalent of the thin air in the mountains: austere, clarifying, and difficult to breathe if you're not accustomed to it. Readers who surrender to its rhythm will find that the sparseness opens outward rather than closing down, that each stripped sentence points toward everything it has chosen not to say.

This is a book about a wound that has not been allowed to close. The title is accurate. The age is still wounded. And Edgü, bearing witness with such scrupulous, tender economy, refuses to let us look away.

[JJS. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ferit Edgu, a rather prolific writer (more than 40 titles to his name), has few of his works translated into English (to my knowledge, only the two works presented in this volume, as well as one of his novels). The first, 'The Wounded Age' consists of rather fragmanted pieces of prose styled poetically describing violent events in the eastern Turkiye, which was the part of the book I liked less, compared to the handful of short stories in the 'Eastern Tales'. The 'Eastern Tales' are somewhat reminiscent of Chekhov and Kafka (the former explicitly referenced in one of the stories), but they also reminded me of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films. The stories are written in a succinct and minimalist way that leaves a raw impression. They are certainly something I will return to for re-reads.
The fact is that, despite the shortage of Turkish authors available in English, this volume is a good to see, since Turkiye has a strong literary tradition, and making them accessible to monoglot English readers is a very good thing to see.

[Jagdish · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Wounded Age" is a novella centered on a journalist dispatched to report on the devastation faced by the inhabitants of southeastern Turkey. It portrays a harsh landscape torn by violence, where villagers live under constant threat from military raids and systemic repression. The narrative is both empathetic and stark, capturing the despair of displaced families alongside moments of quiet human resilience.

" Eastern Tales," a collection of stories blending poetry and prose, further amplifies marginalized voices, offering intimate snapshots of lives overshadowed by political turbulence and ethnic persecution. Edgü’s prose is notable for its minimalistic style, often classified as "Minimal Tales," which distills complex social realities into succinct, potent narratives. This stylistic choice heightens the emotional intensity, allowing suppressed experiences to surface through subtle, poignant storytelling.

Political and Historical Context

Edgü’s literary focus sharply critiques the Turkish state’s treatment of Kurdish and other minority communities, exposing long-standing injustices—including neglect during epidemics, military violence, and forced displacements. Although the Kurdish identity is not always explicitly named, the stories carve out a space for these narratives within Turkish literature, confronting national silence around these issues.

Edgü’s time in Hakkâri was transformative, as he described being "reborn" through witnessing the daily struggles of the region’s people. This personal engagement lends his fiction a memoiristic authenticity and underlines his political commitment. His ability to humanize those at the edges of society, coupled with his experimental narrative forms, distinguishes his work within contemporary Turkish literature. Ferit Edgü’s contribution is crucial in giving voice to Turkey’s marginalized eastern populations, challenging dominant narratives and embodying the writer’s role as both witness and advocate in troubled times.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sitting on a rock, notebook in hand, taking notes.
A man approaches me, stops, and looks.
I stop writing and look at him too.
Can you write a letter for me, Bey? he asks.
I can, I say. Let me hear it.
Write then, he says, that I've never forgotten her. That she's never left my dreams. Did you write?
I wrote.
Write then: We crossed the mountains, made it here safely.
But who knows where we'll be sent next. Did you write?
I wrote.
I'll send word to you when I get there. So you come and find me. Or I, you. Did you write?
I wrote.
That's all, he says. Now hand me the letter.
I tear out the page; handing it to him, I ask, And to whom did we write the letter?
She knows who she is, he says.
Folding the paper in quarters, he puts it in his pocket.
All well and good, but how are you going to get it to her?
Eh, I'll maybe find someone headed that way.
[22]

On this mountain where God left you all alone, by yourself, what dreams visit you?

Do you remember your childhood?

By the sea, there you are, in your trunks, under the scalding August sun, walking into the water, the pebbled seabed, without a whereto, mussels cutting into your soft soles, you dive in, your first breaststrokes, you're almost swimming, the panic when your feet can't touch the pebbles, your arms failing, the clumsy strokes to get back to the shallow, bobbing and sinking, the seawater taste in your throat, the coughs, the panic you try to conceal, then (months later) the rainfall, the floodwaters, the metal shards and coins you look for along the riverbeds (with your friends), then the snowfall, the endless snowfall, the walk to school, the steaming cup of salep and the buttered pogaça, the walk back from school, sledding downhill, on your wooden satchel, then home, the slaps you receive, while wetting your pants, how you wish you were dead, how you wish you were not of this world.
[51]

[Eileen Rigby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for everyone on the planet, especially writers. One of my new all time favorite books, infinity stars


“Do you remember your childhood?

By the sea, there you are, in your trunks, under the scalding August sun, walking into the water, the pebbled seabed, without a whereto, mussels cutting into your soft soles, you dive in, your first breaststrokes, you're almost swimming, the panic when your feet can't touch the pebbles, your arms failing, the clumsy strokes to get back to the shallow, bobbing and sinking, the seawater taste in your throat, the coughs, the panic you try to conceal, then (months later) the rainfall, the floodwaters, the metal shards and coins you look for along the riverbeds (with your friends), then the snowfall, the endless snowfall, the walk to school, the steaming cup of salep and the buttered pogaça, the walk back from school, sledding downhill, on your wooden satchel, then home, the slaps you receive, while wetting your pants, how you wish you were dead, how you wish you were not of this world.”


“Arid roads, parched fields, dried-up bushes, grass, shrubs, wild, flowerless, fruitless trees, dreamless sleeps, untouched women, sharpened knives, mountain fires, a fugitive fox, a wounded mountain hare, a hand touching a hand, an elegy, dying children, two elegies, news on the radio, three or four words learned from the letters you received, two or three words you taught, the steamy yufka bread brought on a platter, herbed cheese on the side, a young girl’s eyes looking into your eyes, a neighing horse, a barking dog, and another, and a third, then the whole pack, then the wolves laying siege to the village, all of them, with all of their colors, their presence and absence, and the smell of humans burning my throat, here beside me, all of them coming with me.”

[John Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never encountered works by Ferit Edgu before but in this book, a compilation of two of his books, that both take place in the contested area in far southeastern Turkey, he tells of the struggles of people in this area through very spare writing. THE WOUNDED AGE comes first, but was published second in Turkish, tells the impressions of a visiting journalist to the displacement of Kurds in this area. I, at first, thought much of the writing were poems, but it is very spare writing, that look like poems. Despite the lack of ornamentation to the writing, it brings a powerful and sad message of the struggles that people encounter here. EASTERN TALES is based on the author's experiences as a teacher in this area when he was still quite young. They consist for four longer stories and fifteen shorter poem-like stories that bring out his conversations with locals or the stories that they tell. Together these two short books come to only 144 pages, but they are very powerfully written and one gets a strong impression of the landscape of this region and challenges residents face living there.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Turkey’s eastern mountain region, Ferit Edgü’s two novellas—The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales—reports on the peoples of the area—Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds—who have been warring against each other for centuries. The vignettes comprising the books, most only a page or two long, come across as a blend of poetry, prose, and drama. We know from The Wounded Age’s introduction that its nameless narrator has been called to cover a mountainous area riddled with murderous ethnic conflicts. The names and backgrounds of those the narrator meets are never identified, probably because they all inflict the same horrors upon each other and in that way resemble each other, each page-long vignette an observation or anecdote from the narrator’s notebook.

For this edition, the two novellas have been switched in terms of chronology of their original release date, with The Wounded Age better representing Edgü’s mature style. These tersely captioned snapshots of observations and conversations with those he encounters are like lyric poems of wartime reminiscence of worry, frustration, fear, and mourning. Whether the people encountered are Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, or Kurd, Edgü tell us only what they say and do, what they eat, what they share, what they fear or shrug off. Many have lived their entire lives as roaming exiles, under fire wherever they attempt to settle. Edgü lived among these peoples for nine months, but the encounters haunted him the rest of his life.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read this Turkish author until now. Vivid writing, very stripped down and essential. There is little in the way of characterizations or descriptions. Only the bare framework for the mind to create what it will. It is chiefly about mood and language. Death haunts nearly every story. Mountain cultures that are encroached by violence from both the outside and within. Violence and death. Dreams and alternate concepts of time. Writing formed from the experience of real life war and trauma. One can't help but bring the ongoing internecine battles between the Turkish government and Kurdish people who want their autonomy (and to be left alone).

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meditative semi-fictional stories of the author's time in Kurdish lands – I found "The Wounded Age" very accessible; chunks of "Eastern Tales" seemed either deliberately opaque or lost in translation. For the most part, the mountain dwellers' struggle (and the narrator's) felt universal; later sections would have benefited from footnotes.

[Charles Sheard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know the words necessary to review these spare, austere works. Never more than an outsider, I cannot know the bleakness of the people's lives, nor the desolation when they are taken. Their mountains are different than my mountains. But I hear the same song, calling me at the dawn when first warmed with light, and again as shadows against the fading glow.

[Barry Westbrook · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book is poetry that I really enjoyed. But the last half are short stories that didn’t seem to have a point

[Daniel Polansky]

Interlinked microfictions inspired by the author's experience as a teacher in war torn Kurdistan. Excellent.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

elegantly descriptive & translated fantastically

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

HAUNTING AND PURE

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Wounded Age” was 5/5, really sparse, incredible prose.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my new favorites

[Jack Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

Filled with detail. I think I read this on an airplane. I skimmed it.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m giving this book 3 stars. If you enjoy novels that feel more like poetry, then this book is for you. If you enjoy reading about different cultures through the lens of an outsider who learns to embrace the newness of it all, then this book is also for you. I had never read a book by a Turkish author nor have I delved much in to Kurdish culture. This book was very eye-opening and gave me a new perspective of a part of the world I previously didn’t think too much about. The reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is because it did take some effort to keep my attention and this genre isn’t really my thing. However, to me 3 stars is still an excellent book, and I would like to recommend that everyone give it a try.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Turkish writer sees the plight of refugees and all underclasses and beautifully encapsulates it into his writing.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effective. Terrific section of 'minimal tales'. They have much of the effect of aphorisms. Their continual loose connection to the preceding story is often forgotten then often made remembered