By Kai Maristed

What sets Cold Nights of Childhood wonderfully apart from today’s autofiction genre is the narrator’s absolute lack of self-pity. There is no blame-game, and no lugubrious victimhood.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Transit Books, 128 pages, $16.95. (Winner of the 2024 NBCC Barrios Prize for Literature in Translation.

Beginning as an apparently aimless, disjointed collage of recollections, this short book steals into the reader’s mind on cat’s feet, on its own terms, bearing bloody trophies of insight and sensation. The scenes shift from Istanbul to Paris to Berlin to Ankara, sliding back and forth in time with no forewarning. Özlü’s indifference to conventional story-telling structure reminded me of recent Nobelist Jon Fosse, who spins sentences that reach no end, whereas Özlü peppers her pages with short fragments. But the disorienting, mind-opening effect is the same. As with Fosse’s mesmerizing novels, from some undefinable point onward, Cold Nights of Childhood becomes impossible to set aside or put out of mind, until after the end, which is the worst part of this book because by that point one is long since anchored deep in its unnamed protagonist’s world, fully expecting it to go on unfolding forward and backward, for a long time.

The cold nights of childhood in 1950s Istanbul are literal, the origin of the narrator’s increasingly chaotic experience of the world. Cold in both senses. “At night I nestle in my mother’s arms to escape the cold, but also loneliness. On winter mornings, we head out of town toward our school, bowing our heads to blizzards. My hands are cracked and bleeding from the cold.” “I ask myself why my father treats us like soldiers. He runs this house like his personal army. That’s for sure. If he were rich, he’d be standing there with a real bugle. The men of my father’s generation — how they cherish the army.” “No sign of warmth or love between my mother and father. With her every movement, my mother makes it clear that she has never loved my father as a man. What binds them together are their weighty petit bourgeois responsibilities. Loveless days. Loveless nights.”

Precious warmth comes from older sister Süm, who will leave and return at critical junctures. When they are very young, “The bed I share with Süm is pretty much collapsed. Way back when, it was our parents’ marriage bed. At night Süm rolls into the hollow […] I lie down on her lap. Tomorrow we shall go our separate ways.

—I’m going to kiss you,
she says.
—I haven’t even kissed a man yet.
—You kiss my top lip, and I’ll kiss your bottom lip, she says.
We do as she says.
If only they could leave us alone. If I could lie down on her lap. To explore our bodies, guided only by our instincts and the love that grows in nature, like a child in a womb.”

It’s nearly a manifesto. There’s rebellion brewing here. A refusal to be tamed, molded, brainwashed by societal norms. Our brave heroine, for she is one, understands, like the English poet William Blake, the inherent goodness of mutually given pleasure. Of these childhood orgasms. That, against the deadliness of middle-class sitting rooms, weak lightbulbs, and “children walking to school in their black uniforms in the gray light of a damp Istanbul morning, practicing the patriotic poems that I have yet to erase from my mind. […] Oh, to part the clouds, seize the sun, and run with these children across the hills and forests, through wind, sun, rain, to a place where we can breathe.”

To run. To escape. But since escape seems impossible, “Late one night, I rise from bed to walk into darkness. […] I gulp down all the pills I’ve been gathering for days now. Then I eat some bread and jam to keep from vomiting them up. I’m a young girl. For days now, I’ve been making the necessary preparations to ensure that my dead body looks beautiful. As if a beautiful dead body were a way of taking revenge. I’m objecting to these houses, these armchairs and carpets, these teachers. This music. These rules. I’m screaming! You can have your little world. I’m screaming!” Madness, then. Early-onset schizophrenia? “I open my eyes to a dirty pillowcase. Embroidered on it are two letters. Initials that tell me I am in a psychiatric clinic.

—They saved me!
I think.
—If only they hadn’t.
I begin to cry.
—What a tidy girl you are, says another patient.”

That’s a taste of Özlü’s sly, wry humor. But there is not much to smile about in this incarceration, or the lock-downs that follow. Strait-jackets. Assaults. Injections that knock her out for days. Electroshock: “The bit they wedge between my teeth is hard, rectangular, the color of bricks. Do I shut my eyes after I bite into it? Or is it the other way around? In an instant I am in the land of death, amnesia, nothingness. Is this what it’s like to be guillotined? The shock is over now. But how swiftly I vanished into nothingness! Terrifying.”

She’s released, weak and wan and starved for life. Bars, dancing, books, spontaneous sexual encounters, furious conversation. A brilliant admired girlfriend. An erudite man she trusts. Another man whom she doesn’t think she loves but will marry, for his promise to keep her out of the madhouse.

“Enthralled by life’s ethereal magnificence, I reduce my sleep. My talents seem to increase with every day. I understand everything so much better. I am sleeping less, but even when I do fall asleep, life still pulses through me. I can work without ever tiring.”

Süm is shocked, frightened by her sister’s recklessness. It’s those who claim to love her most who send her back to the terrifying locked ward. To be buried alive, so young — for how long? Inside, time does not exist.

Cold Nights is, of course, autofiction. Subcategory: the confession of mental illness, which has a long literary lineage, from Maupassant through Kafka, Plath to Ken Kesey (our protagonist watches the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with friends and a sort of professional interest.) What sets it wonderfully apart from today’s autofiction genre is the narrator’s absolute lack of self-pity. There is no blame-game, and no lugubrious victimhood. Özlü aims for the beauty of objectivity, conveying her young woman’s intense embrace of life’s goodness, despite the terrors, up to that sudden, unheralded close. Let us not forget that a century ago ‘melancholia’ was considered to be almost a prerequisite for artistic creativity.

Tezer Özlü — Her writing is admired “for its madness, its honest sexuality, its lack of national fervor, and its individuality.”

If there is a villain lurking in Cold Nights, it’s the straitjacket of bourgeois society. Specifically, the militarised version that permeated Turkey through the ’50s and ’60s, inciting in the ’70s — when Cold Nights reaches its fullness — leftist uprisings that were suppressed with arrests, tortures, killings. In Özlü’s story, the political drama accompanies the personal struggle like a shadow-play. “Spring brings green, white, purple and yellow to the slopes. Butterflies open their wings. The sun warms the air in patches. There’s always a wind. Behind the hills, a tree-lined dirt road goes as far as Ortaköy. Here, amidst the new apartment complexes, there are shantytowns. Past the cemetery, the old Greek houses and their gardens, encircled by crooked stone walls […] We walk these hills with university students, discussing politics as we go. They are sternly idealistic defenders of socialist thought who denounce even the opening of a cafeteria as revisionism. With time they’ll become bureaucrats, technocrats, petit bourgeois family men.” Here and in general I find Özlü’s 1978 cool-eyed realism, paired with a precocious mastery of craft, more contemporary than that of her 2006 Nobel-Prize winning countryman, the historically histrionic Orhan Pahmuk.

Ayşegül Savaş, whose own trajectory as a Turkish author was strongly influenced by Özlü, writes in her introduction: “Cold Nights of Childhood is [her] first novel, and the second of three books she published in her short life-time. She died of breast cancer at the age of forty-three in Zürich, a death even more tragic, perhaps, after years of battling with mental illness. Yet her small œuvre has always had a devout following, especially among young Turkish readers, for its madness, its honest sexuality, its lack of national fervor, and its individuality.”

Özlü’s posthumous good fortune is to have found in translator Maureen Feeley a bilingual, literate and sensitive collaborator. May Cold Nights of Childhood be only the first Özlü volume to appear in English. I’m eager to read all three.

Kai Maristed (www.kaimaristed.com) studied politics and economics in Germany; she lives in Paris and Massachusetts. She has reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and other papers. Her four books include the collection Belong to Me, starred by Publishers Weekly, and Broken Ground, a Berlin Wall story. Recent work is in Five Points, Ploughshares, and Agni. Her new collection, The Age of Migration, won this year’s inaugural Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize.