Walking - by Sevgi Soysal (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Reading Sevgi Soysal today restores the volatility and violence of female concerns, and expands our horizons of understanding how inequality operates. --Helen Mackreath, The White Review

Walking observes the braided lives of Elâ and Memet, two young people growing up in 1970s Yenişehir. Elâ is a girl swept up in the discomfort and excitement of becoming a woman. She plays dress up, trades secrets, and has her first kiss in a monastery garden. Later at university, she reads Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, and reassures herself that there is still time to become a fully rounded person. Memet is a boy who wanders the labyrinthine streets of Tarlabaşı, thinking of dance halls, his guitar, and Playboy. He dreams of walking forward, out to the sea, and turning his back on the barbed conversations of sex that patter between boys and men. As Elâ and Memet's story converges, a peopled vision of Turkey cascades before us: children selling green plums on the streets, mothers coming and going, or an old Greek man conveying passengers onto a ferry where folksongs rumble. Conversations give way to fragments of nature and beauty found along city streets. Soysal writes as one uncovering and restoring a fresco, tending to its bright and unpredictable edges.

Walking explores questions of love, fury, freedom, and agency with piercing clarity. It tells of two young people making sense of their conflicted feelings about who they are and what they've been told. Even if I am like you and you are like me, how can we be as one, how can we make love, if we cut ourselves off from this injustice? For Soysal, the outside world, its conflicts and injustices, always flows to the world within, a world of memory, rebellion, and the hope of morning's first light. Soysal's singularly humane vision restores dignity to transgressive desires and longings.

Review Quotes

"In Soysal's writing--by turns elegiac, roving, and rhapsodic--Walking traces the lives of Êla and Memet in brief, impressionistic scenes from youth to adulthood... With an uncanny presentiment of the coming military coup in 1971 and the ensuing persecution, imprisonment, and execution of left-wing and student activists, Walking has all the makings of a requiem." --Eamon McGrath, The Brooklyn Rail

"An exhilarating portrayal of human lives in a Turkish city, encompassing their wishes, desires, secrets, envies and emptiness. Soysal trusts the reader, and we trust her." --Declan O'Driscoll, The Irish Times

"Reading Soysal is like stepping out into the sun after a rainstorm: her language clear, bright and lyric, the world that emerges resplendent even in its complications, its will, and its whim. Walking is a sublime, singular novel on the female condition." --Mina Seçkin

About the Author

Sevgi Soysal (1936-1976) was born in Istanbul. Her work is inspired by her childhood in Ankara, youth and student movements in Turkey, revolutionary dreams, and experiences of leftist intellectuals in prison and in exile. In 1974, Soysal won the prestigious Orhan Kemal Award for Best Novel for Noontime in Yenişehir, which she wrote while in prison. Dawn was published in 1975, a beautiful thematic companion to her memoirs of prison life, which were originally published in the newspaper Politika and published in a single volume as Yıldırım Area Women's Ward in 1976. She wrote a brilliant set of endearing and illuminating story collections, novels, and memoirs over the course of her short life. Soysal died at the age of 40 of cancer. She left behind an incomplete novel, Welcome, Death!

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, senior lecturer at Warwick University. Translator of five books by Orhan Pamuk, Fethiye Cetin's My Grandmother, and - with Alexander Dawe - Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute and Sait Faik Abasıyanık's A Useless Man, she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, and The Sunday Times for two decades. Her novels include Sailing through Byzantium, Enlightenment, Angry in Piraeus, and The Other Rebecca.