In the Silence of Life

• A terrific book by Aslı Erdoğan collecting her stories. "In absolute silence, a human speaks merely to hear the cadence of words."

• The texts in 'Hayatın Sessizliğinde', published in 2005, contain in a sense the manifesto of Aslı Erdoğan's literary journey. They reflect the essence of her outlook on life, writing, and lived experiences. We might also call it a testimony to her ebbs and flows between dream and thought, emotion and illusion.

• It is hard not to feel the solitude and sense of estrangement that grip Aslı Erdoğan as she writes her latest book. Impossible not to be overcome by the nostalgia and memory that fill the Turkish author as she writes about her childhood, her mother, or Istanbul—that beloved city from which she is separated.

• This was a good book and worth reading for the excellence of its writing. It was a memoir of the author’s childhood growing up in Galata, a poor area of Istanbul, as well as a recounting of the solitude of being a feminist in Istanbul and an author. The writing style is dreamlike with the author drifting from memory to memory using one lovely description after another.

• I can't say her stories bring a joy of living—the atmosphere strongly recalls Tezer Özlü—but what is written etches itself into you. You can't help but admire such an intense imagination existing in a human being, and her mastery in conveying it to the reader. Sometimes you can't quite grasp what she is speaking of, the author drifts away. In those moments, Oğuz Atay comes to mind... Read it... but not on the subway or just before sleep; read it when you have time, when your senses are sharp...

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