Turkey: Motherland Hotel (Yusuf Atılgan, trans. Fred Stark)
Yusuf Atılgan (1921-1989) was a Turkish writer, known for pioneering the modern Turkish novel. After studying Turkish language and literature at İstanbul University, Atılgan taught literature for a while before beginning to write. Many of his books deal with topics of loneliness and neuroses.
Background: Starting c.1200 BC, Turkey was settled by Greeks until the Persians conquered the area during the 6th century BC. In 499 BC the Greeks rebelled beginning a war, although Alexander the Great took power in 334 BC. After his death, the region was divided into smaller kingdoms that eventually became part of the Roman Empire. In 324, Constantine I chose Byzantium (now Instanbul) to be the capital of the Roman Empire (later called the Byzantine Empire), which ruled the area until the later Middle Ages. In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks began to migrate into Turkey, and in 1071 they beat the Byzantines. Islam and the Turkish language were introduced. In 1243, the Mongols invaded, but Osman I managed to hold on to some territory which was eventually grown into the Ottoman empire. Throughout the following centuries, the empire grew, battling with both east and west, the Europeans on one side and the Persians on the other. Towards the 19th century, the Russian Tsardom started in from the north as well. During the second half of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire went into decline. By 1908 the Young Turk Revolution brought back the Ottoman constitution and parliament, although a coup in 1913 reversed this. During World War I, the Ottomans deported and murdered 800,000-1,500,000 Armenians, an act that they have still yet to admit to. After being defeated, the Turkish National Movement sought to establish a new Republic. In 1922 the Sultanate was officially abolished, and a secular constitution was put in place. In the past decades, coups (1960, 1971, 1980) have occasionally rocked political stability, and the Turks invaded Cyprus, establishing the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983 (recognized only by Turkey). Although economic stability has increased significantly, since 2013 government dissent has increased dramatically, and a coup tried to oust the government in 2016.
Motherland Hotel is an intensely creepy book. Zeberjet is the last living member of a once wealthy family. He runs the Motherland Land, once beautiful and now worn. His life is isolating and repetitive. Occasionally he has sex with the maid, but mostly he keeps to himself. One day, a beautiful women stays at the hotel, and upon leaving, promises to return shortly. Zeberjet begins to obsess over her, and the once slightly reclusive man retreats to an inner world of fantasy and paranoia. Zeberjet slowly loses his sense of reality, and the reader is drawn into his confusion and fixation as his actions move from harmless to more problematic and strange. I enjoyed this book a lot, but is definitely pretty dark, and maybe not recommended for extremely sensitive readers.
