Cold Nights of Childhood

 

 I received a copy of this release from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Cold Nights of Childhood

Author: Tezer Özlü

Publisher: Transit Books

Release Date: 5.2.23

Publisher’s Summary 

The Bell Jar meets Good Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey’s most beloved writers.

The narrator of Tezer Özlü’s novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman’s sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.

Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhoodcemented Tezer Özlü’s status as one of Turkey’s most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood d is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.

My Review

Definitely not an easy read, both in topic and flow. Similar to The Bell Jar, this 160-page novella centers around a young woman in Istanbul, Berlin, and Paris in the 1970s (and earlier) repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness. This would be a great choice for any book in translation or "read around the world" book challenges.