Lojman
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $16.95
ISBN13: 9780872868984
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: Aug 15 2023
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
WINNER of the Republic of Consciousness Prize!
Abandoned by her husband, marooned by an epic snowstorm, a mother gives birth to her third child. Her sense of entrapment turns into a desperate rage in this unblinking portrait of a woman whose powerlessness becomes lethal.
Lojman tells, on its surface, the domestic tale of a Kurdish family living in a small village on a desolate plateau at the foot of the snow-capped mountains of Turkey's Van province. Virtually every aspect of the family's life is dictated by the government, from their exile to the country's remote, easternmost region to their sequestration in the grim teacher's lodging--or lojman--to which they're assigned. When Selma's husband walks out one day, he leaves in his wake a storm of resentment between his young children and a mother reluctant to parent them.
Written in startling, raw prose, this novel -- the author's first to be translated into English -- is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante's masterful Days of Abandonment, though its private dramas are made all the more vivid against an imposing natural landscape that exerts a powerful, life-threatening force.
In short, propulsive chapters, Lojman spins a domestic drama crystallized through the family's mental and physical claustrophobia. Vivid daydreams morph with cold realities, and as the family's descent reaches its nadir, their world is transformed into a surreal, gelatinous prison from which there is no escape.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Paperback
