Whatever you call this, it's amazing

Tezer Özlü, a Turkish author, died in 1986 at age 43. Her second novel to be translated into English (brilliantly by Maureen Freely), Journey to the Edge of Life, was published in 2025. An earlier book, Cold Nights of Childhood, won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Journey to the Edge of Life is hard to classify. A novel? Not in conventional terms as "an extended work of fiction." 

A travelog? The narrator reports her travels from Hamburg to Berlin to Vienna to Prague to Zagreb to Trieste. 

A meditation? She is in her early 40s apparently unaware of the cancer that will kill her shortly and writes about her life.

An appreciation? She visits Kafka's grave, comments on Pavese, visits with Svevo's daughter, all Özlü's literary idols.

Because she is such a good writer (or Freely is such a skillful translator) the best way to introduce Journey to the Edge of Life is to allow Özlü to speak: ". . . I look at the wan face in the mirror and see a child in Gerede, dressed in her school smock, black with a white school collar, her hair tied back with taffeta ribbons. I see a pupil who recites heroic poems on holidays, and a young housewife who rushes from city to city, seeking other worlds. I see a woman who is loved and is abused by two husbands, a woman who is deceived by two husbands and who deceives them both. I see a woman who learned to resist, drawing on her own resources . . . ."

I'd never heard of Özlü. I bought the paperback on the strength of the blurbs (a practice I do not recommend) and because Transit Books, which has a thought-provoking backlist, published it. As I read, I was struck repeatedly by Özlü's thoughts which made me think. For example, "Are walls life's cemeteries. Are not the selves we parade in the streets all false. Isn't every self that appears on the city streets a new persona, an alibi assumed. Aren't we most ourselves behind the walls. Is it not behind walls that we can best resist the outside world." (The lack of question marks seems to be her style.)

And her comments on the passing scene can be sharp. She's in Vienna. "Now a horse and carriage passes before me, carrying tourists. They want to live in seventeenth-century Vienna. In the middle of all these exhaust fumes, the traffic . . . . "

The book's cover description says "her journey transmutes passion for literature into desire for meaning." A desire for meaning. Isn't that what we all desire? 

I'm disheartened that Özlü could not have lived on. I'd have followed wherever she led.

If fascinating stories are your utopia, try these

Your Utopia by Bora Chung, skillfully translated from Korean by Anton Hur, is an original and engaging collection of eight stories. Because they are set in the future, the book is probably shelved with science fiction, but it could also fit under the horror and or the fantasy umbrella. 

On the basis of Your Utopia Chung sees a bleak future for humanity. In "The End of the Voyage" a single human remains after a mysterious plague has wiped out every other person. People infected by the plague show no symptoms until, uncontrollably, they start to eat another person. 

(I'm hardly spoiling the story by telling you this because Chung herself tells you this in the first two pages. We enjoy the story by seeing how Chung is able to reach those pages.)

In "The Center for Immorality Research" a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that results during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors who hope to live forever.

In "A Song for Sleep," an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident.

And in "Seed" Earth's now-sentient plants who narrate the story have a fraught meeting with some of Earth's corporate workers. As the plants say."The future of our world would depend on this single and first encounter."

A world-wide plague of cannibals . . . an AI elevator . . . sentient, mobile trees—where does Chung get these things? Okay, Tolkin has ambulatory trees, but still. . . .  Several of the stories have an O. Henry twist or revelation at the end, but this does not diminish the story's impact. Indeed, as in O. Henry, the final paragraph can throw the story into perspective. 

She's written three novels and three collections of short stories. Cursed Bunny, her earlier collection of short stories, also translated into English by Anton Hur, was a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. 

She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She has taught Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. If you are interested in original ideas, Chung is someone to follow.

You don't have to be able-bodied to write porn

 “I wrote this novel [Hunchback] thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,” says Saou Ichikawa the author. “Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.”

Ichikawa, 45, was the 181st winner of the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to breathe, and was the first author with a severe physical disability to win.

According to a NY Times article, she was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. She became an author in her twenties and in 20 years wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories for young readers. But publishers rejected all of her manuscripts.

She enrolled in an online degree program at Waseda University, one of Japan’s top schools, in 2019 and began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature, and in my experience, mostly hidden in Japan. She decided to tell the story of a character like herself. The result is the slim novel Hunchback, wonderfully translated by Polly Barton, one of my favorite translators.

Shaka Isawa, who is severely disabled, tells her story which is by turns erotic, funny, horrifying, and poignant. She makes a living writing soft- and (apparently) hard-core porn for an erotic website. One day—as I copy shamelessly from the flap copy—a new male carer reveals that he has read it all: the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Isawa's response? An indecent proposal.

As I said, the book is short, a novella rather than a novel. You can read it in an evening. Nevertheless it is powerful and engaging, a convincing portrait of an original woman, the first-hand evocation of a life most of us—thankfully—have not personally experienced. Which is, of course, a good reason to read it.