The BURIED Book Club discussion

Only three of Erje Ayden's many English titles are currently on Goodreads — The Crazy Green of Second Avenue (1965), Seven Years of Winter: An Autobiography (1970), and Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance (1972) — with a total of 32 ratings and 5 reviews between them.

Here's a little background on Ayden from Books Abroad, Vol. 47. No. 2 (1973):

"Erje Ayden came to the United States in the late fifties as a very young man in his late teens and proceeded willfully and systematically to divest himself of his Turkish orientation and to plunge into the English language and New York life. In the early sixties, he began to enjoy recognition as a brave new voice of underground literature. The Crazy Green of Second Avenue, published in 1965, a stark and sometimes startling sex novel, became Ayden's first popular success after The Harbor of Whales had attracted some attention in 1964 as an imaginative start for a very young author grappling with his newly adopted language, to which he brought many fresh turns and twists.

"From 1966 to 1970, Erje Ayden concentrated on autobiographical fiction: Confessions of a Nowaday Child, From Hauptbahnhof I Took a Train, Summer Frank O'Hara Died, Seven Years of Winter (also entitled The Legend of Erje Ayden), in which Ayden frequently appears as the anti-romantic anti­-hero and many younger figures of New York's art and literature circles arc given sympathetic or scathing exposure. All of Ayden's fiction displays the same strengths and weaknesses: an absorbing story-line, swift staccato narration, fluent real-life dialogue, intriguing episodes, but deficiency of drama and passion, characters portrayed in one-dimensional terms, vagueness of themes, lack of total structure. An overall view of the Turkish expatriate's work, however, yields the impression that perhaps all the weaknesses, like all the strengths, are part of an elaborate design which reflects the confusions of New York's artistic circles. It is a world peopled by sensitive and calloused figures who can be, oxymoronically, profound and shallow, psychotic and pragmatic, loyal and treacherous, sophomoric and prophetic, lovable and loathsome, soporific and stirring. All these conflicting qualities come alive in Ayden's autobiographical work which identifies many of its famous characters by name and thinly disguises some others. Although he frequently satirizes their foibles and failures and praises a few of their virtues, he exercises tactfulness — almost an inhibition or embarrassment — in dealing with personal tragedies and triumphs."

Some links:

Bricklayer, Waiter, Gravedigger, Spy
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/11/25...

Sadness at Leaving: Cult New York School Author, Spy & Friend Erje Ayden Dies at 77
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...

John Ashbery & Frank O'Hara on Erje Ayden, the Pulp Writer for the New York School
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...

The Crazy Turk of New York City: Fact and Fiction in Erje Ayden’s Work
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

I'll soon be publishing Erje Ayden's 1966 long out of print second novel, Confessions of a Nowaday Child, a brilliant, quirky, and brutally honest account of a writer's struggles and bohemian life in 1960s Greenwich Village.

Again, I will be running a Kickstarter campaign to help defray some of the production costs. Here's the link. Feel free to share it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

In short, Confessions of a Nowaday Child is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Turkish-born writer living in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with occasional flashbacks to his childhood in Istanbul, who makes a promise to himself "to become the greatest writer of the new American generation," despite the fact that he can barely speak or write in English.

As the original edition's jacket blurb states, "It's all here — how and why he did it — the incredible sexual adventures, the violence and the poetry of a tormented mind that has moments of great beauty, simplicity, joy. It's breathtaking in its arrogance, but strangely an affirmation of life, modern life, and the process of making it. The straight, cruddy reality and its rewards spelled out."

Some quotes about Ayden:

"Ayden brings a healthy original approach to the American novel. He is free of introspection. He well chooses his words."
— William Burroughs

"The artlessness of the writing makes the experience of reading Ayden as refreshing and startling as drinking from a natural brook in the center of Manhattan."
— Seymour Krim

"Ayden is one of the sexiest writers we have; because of his struggles with acquired language he has a vigor uncommon among our novelists; without the mannerist inclinations of Salinger, Pynchon, Barth, or Updike, he is able to convey the real trouble underneath the bizarre and the banal."
— Frank O'Hara

"Erje Ayden's novels provide a little-known but fascinating view of American bohemian and bourgeois society from the point of view of a sympathetically bemused Turkish observer. The wonder is that Ayden's not more famous, as he can be as addictive as Simenon or Proust."
— John Ashbery

"Ayden writes with nobility."
— Times Literary Supplement