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A Light Still Burns

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
296 Seiten
Englisch
V&Q Bookserschienen am01.04.20231. Auflage
'There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.' After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdo?an's account of Gül's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.

Selim Özdo?an was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing his prose since 1995. His work has won him numerous prizes and grants. Aside from writing, he is a very experienced yoga practitioner and an inveterate literary performer. He has published several short story collections and twelve novels, including The Blacksmith's Daughter (2021) and 52 Factory Lane (2022) with V&Q Books.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR15,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR6,49

Produkt

Klappentext'There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.' After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdo?an's account of Gül's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.

Selim Özdo?an was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing his prose since 1995. His work has won him numerous prizes and grants. Aside from writing, he is a very experienced yoga practitioner and an inveterate literary performer. He has published several short story collections and twelve novels, including The Blacksmith's Daughter (2021) and 52 Factory Lane (2022) with V&Q Books.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783863913670
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum01.04.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten296 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1221 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.11381592
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

II

It s hot inside the flat, and Gül often stands by the open window, looking down onto the street. The attic flat in Bremen is her seventh home. First she lived with her parents, in the village and then in town, and later she moved into her in-laws house; then she moved to Germany, where she lived in a little flat with Fuat before they moved to Factory Lane, an unpaved street, home mainly to other Turks. Happy days on Factory Lane were followed by years in her own house in Turkey, and now, after weeks on Ceyda s couch, she finds herself in a flat in an old building from before the war. Out the window, she can see a street with lots of shops, takeaways and restaurants, young people with brightly coloured hair, students, homeless people, and people who seem absent, moving a little too slowly, seemingly unaware of where they re going. She sees and hears Germans, Turks, Kurds, Italians, and she notices there aren t any children playing in the street here.

An old German couple who don t say hello live below them, and she still hasn t seen anyone in the flat two floors down. The first person she gets to know here is Herr Bender, who owns the bookshop on the ground floor. He s about fifty, with silver-grey hair - he wears dark-coloured shirts, and his blue eyes seem to smile kindly behind his glasses. He always acknowledges Gül and speaks to her a few times too. These are the first conversations Gül s had in German since she s been back. She s heard lots of German in the last few weeks and has been getting used to the language again, but when she starts to speak, she realises she exhausts her limits quicker than before. It makes her uncomfortable, but she smiles because she doesn t want to discourage Herr Bender. She explains, as best she can, that she lived nearby for many years, that she s spent a few years in Turkey, that she s now moved to Germany for a second time, that she has two married daughters, and that she s unemployed for the time being. Herr Bender is currently looking for a new cleaning lady. Gül has been living in the attic flat for two weeks when she starts work cleaning the bookshop after closing time.

If Fuat knew about this, he might be pleased to know his wife is so shrewd. But when he gets home after his shift, he picks up his dinner without saying a word, pours himself a whiskey and Coke, and plonks himself down in front of the TV. He watches German quiz shows, American action series, the news; he ll watch anything, but he seems grateful that there s more choice now and he can switch between channels at his leisure. But still, when a quiz contestant wins the jackpot, Fuat will open his mouth and say, It beggars belief.

If it s a lot of money, he ll go one step further: All that moolah for twenty minutes work - the only thing quicker is filling out a lottery ticket. Probably doesn t even need the money, just look at him. What a life - only the rich ever win. If only we could put that kind of money away without having to bow and scrape and sweat for it. That s clean money, crisp notes that ve never seen the muck of the factory floor. Just look at it; every penny we ve put aside stinks of sweat and hard work. Every single penny.

Gül doesn t react. This is the second time she s spent the summer in Germany instead of going to Turkey; it s hot up on the top floor, she has no one to talk to, and when she takes the stairs up to the flat, she s out of breath and drenched with sweat by the time she s made it half way. She wonders if the stairs would be easier if she lost weight. She wonders if she should go to Turkey alone, if her daughters know what s going on. She wonders where they go from here. She wonders, every day.

Gül dreams she s in her father s summer house and everyone s together again. She dreams herself there without thinking of recent events; she dreams up that togetherness that they ve only ever been able to enjoy for weeks at a time; she dreams herself to her daughters, who are spending the summer with their grandfather - she can call them now, because her father has a telephone at home. She regularly goes and stands in the stuffy phone booth over the road and calls them up. Some of the money she earns working for Herr Bender she collects in five-mark pieces, and she takes a handful of them in her bag when she goes over to make a call. They don t have a telephone at home, but even if they did, she wouldn t make calls from it; she wouldn t know how much she was spending, and this way, at least she can slot one coin after another into the machine and Fuat is none the wiser.

Fatma has said her first words; Ceyda hasn t had any migraines on holiday and has been staying in town with her children Duygu and Timur, while her husband Adem is off visiting his grandparents in their village. Gül s brother, Emin, has given up his job as a teacher and is moving to Istanbul, where Nalan, the youngest of his four sisters, has lived for years. Melike, the second-eldest, doesn t seem very happy about this for some reason. But of all the things Gül hears from her hometown that summer, what concerns her most is the news of Mecnun s constant stomach pains. He can hardly eat a thing and has already lost nine kilos while they ve been on holiday. Nine kilos? He was no fatter than Gül s little finger to start with - he must be little more than skin and bone now. If only she could give him a few of the kilos she has to spare.

Gül can often be found standing in the stuffy little booth. She knows she mustn t take it for granted that she can hear her daughters voices, and she knows she mustn t take it for granted that, in those short phone calls, no one seems to notice that she tells them less than she used to.

It s her second summer in Germany, a summer when Fuat comes home and can hardly wait for kick-off. When Gül sees the joy he takes in following the game, she boils with rage. How can he? His envy of other people s money, his belief that happiness is all down to your bank balance has hardly bothered her before, but now she finds herself wondering how he can be so detached. Gül s anger doesn t escape Fuat s notice, even though she bites her tongue. He says: Surely you can t begrudge me this game? I m home on the dot every day, I don t drink with my friends, I don t gamble, I don t do anything anymore; I just go to work and come straight home. I m like a prisoner here, you could-

Shut your mouth, says Gül, or who knows what will happen. Just shut your bloody mouth.

Fuat is so shocked, he falls silent.

Gül stands at the window, smoking and looking down at the street as it empties before the football starts. She looks down at the street and thinks every day about the words she s heard so often: Leave home, no returning; come home, forever yearning.

So say the ancestors.

Perhaps the world was different then, Gül thinks. Perhaps it didn t turn as quickly. In those days you could still go back, but that s not possible now. She knows she hasn t seen much of Germany - far less than she s seen of Turkey, and she hardly knows Turkey either. Her friend Aysel in Turkey told her she used to work in German vineyards. Gül can t imagine vineyards in Germany; she hardly knows this country, but the little she does know has changed. In the old days, you couldn t get peppers or aubergines, watermelons or lamb. Now, out of her window, she sees a kebab shop across the road selling döner and lahmacun, which everyone here just calls Turkish pizza .

Germany has changed. She didn t notice it while she was living on Factory Lane, she was too close up; but now she sees that the country she originally came to no longer exists. Just as Turkey is not the same country she once left. Those who leave can never return, because the places they knew disappear.

What on earth brought her to Germany, why did she marry a man who followed the call of money, why did God give Fuat eyes that could only ever see the riches on the horizon but not the worries on his wife and daughters minds?

And yet she s back here now, and there may be no returning, but there are reunions with the people she loves. You ll always see people again, as long as you re still on this side of life.

You have to stay together, she thinks, you have to stay together, even if it means you have less than you once did. There s no going back, and you can t just up and leave and find a new homeland because you weren t happy with the old one. The same way you can t just go looking for a new woman because you ve sent your wife ahead on her own, only to never follow her. Staying together takes willpower. And loyalty. Being loyal means not constantly looking out for something better and trying to gain an advantage.

Gül never chose for her mother to die so young; she never chose to be the oldest of five and to have to look after the others....
mehr

Autor

Selim Özdogan was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing his prose since 1995. His work has won him numerous prizes and grants. Aside from writing, he is a very experienced yoga practitioner and an inveterate literary performer. He has published several short story collections and twelve novels, including The Blacksmith's Daughter (2021) and 52 Factory Lane (2022) with V&Q Books.
A Light Still Burns