Stop Living Inside Literature

Bekah Waalkes reviews Turkish author Tezer Özlü’s novel “Journey to the Edge of Life,” translated by Maureen Freely.

By Bekah WaalkesMay 28, 2025

• Fiction

LIKE MANY avid readers, I have often been drawn to see the places where my favorite writers lived and wrote. I’ve walked the Haworth Moor thinking of the Brontë sisters, admired Emily Dickinson’s remarkably small writing desk in her Amherst home, gotten so lost in the cobbled streets of Prague that Franz Kafka’s novels took on new meaning. Like digging through a box of letters in an archive, I hope that seeing a writer’s surroundings will be clarifying, even surprising. But in the end, I often feel as if this kind of literary travel only brings me closer to myself: these pilgrimages help me understand how my own inner world has been irrevocably shaped by the books I read.

Tezer Özlü’s autofictional novel Journey to the Edge of Life explores precisely this issue: the contours of a consciousness shaped by books. Özlü’s haunting prose, now beautifully translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely, recounts a literary pilgrimage inspired by a lifetime of reading. We follow an unnamed writer as she travels to see the cities and graves of three writers who have influenced her: Kafka, Italo Svevo, and, most significantly, Cesare Pavese, with whom she (almost) shares a birthday, Pavese’s on September 9 and Özlü’s the next day (both diligent Virgos!). The narrator travels without much of a plan, moving like a shade through various European cities, if a shade could drag a loud roller bag through the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Niš, Belgrade, Trieste, and Turin. She attracts odd glances from people in cafés (often due to the roller bag). She takes lovers and leaves them behind. She moves restlessly, sometimes backtracking, sometimes staying in place.

But the narrator’s journey has one ultimate destination: Santo Stefano Belbo, the Italian birthplace of Pavese, and Turin, the city where, in 1950, he died by suicide alone in a hotel room. Özlü first wrote Journey to the Edge of Life in German as Auf den Spuren eines Selbstmords (or “On the Trail of a Suicide”), then rewrote the novel in Turkish in 1984, retitling it Yaşamın Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the Edge of Life).

While the suicide the narrator is stalking is clearly Pavese’s, Özlü is also writing about her own past. Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri (1980; English tr. Maureen Freely, as Cold Nights of Childhood, 2023), Özlü’s first novel, is a fictional account of her own unhappy childhood, teenage suicide attempt, and years spent in and out of psychiatric institutions in Istanbul and Ankara. Pavese’s influence on her writing is most clear when Özlü writes of death, conceptualizing it as a constant companion. One of Pavese’s final poems (in Mario and Mark Pietralunga’s translation) begins: “Death will come and it will have your eyes— / this death which accompanies us / from morning to night, sleepless, / deaf, like an old remorse / or an absurd vice.” In Cold Nights of Childhood, Özlü writes, “Thoughts of death chase after me. Day and night, I think about killing myself. My reasons unclear. To carry on with life, or to die—either will do. A vague disquiet, nothing more.” For both Özlü and Pavese, death is active, even aggressive: it will “come,” “accompany,” even “chase” a person. The desire for death manifests as “an absurd vice” and “a vague disquiet,” an unsettling, unknown force that persists.

It’s easy to imagine a young Özlü voraciously reading Pavese, finding in his words a key to understanding her own unhappiness. But as the narrator draws closer to Santo Stefano Belbo, the reader begins to wonder if reading Pavese might also have had a negative influence on Özlü. Could his writing about suicide—a topic that Pavese thought and wrote about obsessively from a young age—have imparted a particularly melancholic narrative to Özlü? This tension betrays the novel’s central question: what is the boundary between life and literature?

Özlü takes the residue of books very literally, using the novel’s intimate and diaristic form to illustrate how language and ideas remain stuck in one’s consciousness after a lifetime of reading. Always written from the particularities of memory, Journey to the Edge of Life portrays reading as simultaneously sustaining and destructive.

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Characteristically, Journey begins with a scene of reading. It’s springtime in Berlin, 1982, and the narrator is reading An Absurd Vice (1983), a biography of Pavese written by his friend and colleague Davide Lajolo. “[T]ime stops for an hour or eternity,” the narrator recounts, “while a chill runs through me.” From the very first page, books are portrayed as immensely powerful, able to condense or extend time, to stop it altogether. Rather than a reader consuming writing in a straightforward mode, Özlü’s experience of reading is more like a chemical reaction between language and brain, an experiment run over and again with variable results. At the right time and place, Özlü suggests, a certain book might leave a lasting imprint on a reader, might change their entire life, while other texts leave no mark.

Pavese’s traces in Özlü’s mind become literal as quotations from his work, including letters of his reprinted in An Absurd Vice, are woven into the novel (some retranslated by Freely). On the first page, the narrator reflects:

Wasn’t I always reading [Pavese] in Istanbul. My every heartbeat, and every sight that has ever caught my eye: if ever I can make sense of them, it is through the images he sketches and the phrases he shapes and the words I take from him and make my own. Why. What is it in my nature that drives me to draw him so deep inside.

Özlü often forgoes question marks and expressive punctuation, giving the prose a hurried quality, as if she was making notes to herself. At the same time, the constant use of periods lends a flatness, a distance, to her writing that makes the narrator, ironically, hard to read. It is as though the book is addressed to its own author: Özlü uses both first and second person to write about (and to) herself, often leaping through time in a single sentence.

This kind of temporal leap happens in Prague, where the narrator looks for Kafka’s grave. (Regrettably, this is one of the shorter sections of the novel; Kafka’s lasting impact on the narrator is implied more than meditated upon.) She ends up in the wrong cemetery before finding her way to his final resting place, a grave shared with his parents in the city’s New Jewish Cemetery. The scene unfolds with the logic of a memory. The present scene of visiting the grave is intercut with a future scene in Vienna when the narrator remembers Kafka’s letter to his father and realizes that “the father who bore down on him all his life is now lying on top of him in his grave. How strange that this didn’t occur to you when you visited that grave yesterday.” The journey to Vienna is barely narrated, mentioned briefly before the scene returns to Prague.

Özlü prefers to let the reader negotiate the time and place of each sentence, which can sometimes feel like trying to read her mind, to imagine her memories. These kinds of temporal jumps, from past to present and present to future, are characteristic of Özlü’s work. She refuses to translate her thinking into linear sequence and logical cause and effect. To read Özlü is to surrender to the intricate, idiosyncratic movements of her mind and memory as she bends the reader into the flow of her thinking. After a few pages, reading Özlü becomes meditative, almost trance-like.

After Prague, the narrator moves to Yugoslavia (Niš and Belgrade, now in Serbia), and then the Italian seaport Trieste: the city of Italo Svevo. She walks “the streets you came to know in Svevo’s writings, the streets you’ve walked in your thoughts and dreams,” addressing her past self with an excitement bordering on ecstasy. The narrator arranges a visit with Svevo’s daughter Letizia, his only heir, and is enchanted by her grand home and appearance. “I can’t take my eyes off her,” she thinks. “The woman sitting across from me is more beautiful than all the portraits, chairs, chandeliers, art, and silver displayed in these stately interconnecting rooms. All that remains of her past is emotion, thought, and pain: literature.”

Yet their dialogue becomes slightly tense as the conversation turns toward the events that shaped Svevo’s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience, in a scene that hinges on interpretive limitations. Letizia’s interpretation of her father is straightforward and biographical, tied to her relation to him as a daughter. But the narrator’s interpretation of Svevo emerges through his writing—and through the impact reading him has left on her mind. Both women have read the same writer, but both interpret him differently, according to their own memories. The narrator tried to extract something juicy from Letizia: was Svevo happily married to Letizia’s mother, despite trying to marry her sisters first, as in Zeno’s Conscience? Why did he consign her aunt Ada to “misery” in the novel, despite loving her? But Letizia cannot read her father as the narrator does, trapped in her “petty bourgeois sentiments” that the narrator has “been in lifelong rebellion” against—sentiments such as the nuclear family.

This note of rebellion sounds throughout the novel. The narrator rejects borders and nationalities, writing, “I am not a citizen. No country or class can claim me.” She refuses monogamy and embraces pleasure. It’s moving to see that some of the freedom of mobility and thought that the narrator so craves in Cold Nights of Childhood is achieved by the narrator of Journey to the Edge of Life. The independence of traveling alone, of moving according to her own whims, is a luxury that she never forgets. In Trieste, thinking of Svevo the chain-smoker, she recalls her time in mental hospitals in Istanbul, when chain-smoking was her only freedom.

Sitting in the Svevo section in the city library, she remarks, “Could I ever want more independence than this.” The line is neither question nor exclamation, not deadpan but not quite earnest either. It’s a classic Özlü sentence: peripatetic, toeing the line between insight and aphorism, never settling its own meaning. Her wandering sentences match the narrator’s peace in movement: “It is only on a moving train that I can be myself, and at long last take in the real world. Everything that stands still bores me.”

From Trieste, the narrator heads to Turin, growing ecstatic as she draws nearer to the land of Pavese. She imagines Pavese waiting for her there, reflecting: “Had his suicidal thoughts still lived hidden inside him, I might have had the chance to see his anguished, beautiful face, and who knows, I might have been able to caress it.” In Turin, she follows the traces of Pavese’s suicide to the Einaudi publishing house where he worked, the train station where he left for exile in Calabria, and most of all, the room in the Hotel Roma where he died by suicide, which reminds her of a coffin. His green marble grave in Turin is “so alien to the man he was and the words he left us.” Like Pavese himself, who constantly longed for the hills of the countryside he grew up in, the narrator escapes to Santo Stefano Belbo.

She brings Orazio, a receptionist at the Hotel Roma, who becomes a mirror image of Pavese in the Langhe hills. The narrator’s embrace of this earnest, virginal young man reads as her own attempt to rewrite Pavese’s own constant rejections by women, rejections that Lajolo suspects led to his suicide. The narrator becomes Orazio’s sexual mentor, teaching him how to please women. In the countryside, the narrator draws deeper into Pavese’s world and thus deeper into her own, as the hills of Piedmont begin to look like “the İzmir countryside that gave me my first images of the world,” the “mountain range that gave me my first childhood fears, before spilling into the Aegean Sea.” As her reading of Pavese becomes layered with her childhood memories, we begin to see how much of the narrator’s journey is an attempt to reach her own past, a past constituted as much by fiction as by actual lived experience.

In Piedmont, in Pavese’s birthplace, the narrator finally stops to reflect on her trip. She has reached an end point. “Perhaps I came to Santo Stefano Belbo to stop living inside literature,” she writes:

Before I got here, I believed that life was stronger than literature, and I was determined to experience as much of it as I could. But still I could not extract myself from literature, and this was the paradox that held me in its grip. […] Now I understand that literature has more life in it than life, and that life is its seedbed.

The narrator begins to understand the maladaptive tendencies running underneath her love of literature: her lifetime of reading has imparted an obsession with meaning, a desire to find the right kind of shape for her life. “Even when I wasn’t going anywhere, I was, from an early age, imagining myself on a journey that made life worth living, because it never ended,” she thinks. Books have become life itself for the narrator, fiction blending with memory to constitute the strange terrain of her mind, which comes to form the strange terrain of the novel.

At the end of Journey to the Edge of Life, the narrator backs away from the world of literature. She realizes that she hasn’t brought a single book on her trip, reflecting that “for a quarter century, I’ve been reading, reading, reading, and now, freed of books, I am looking inside myself for words’ traces.” The novel’s final turn illustrates just how far the narrator’s journey has taken her. Transported back in memory to the Hotel Roma, the narrator thinks, “I must go. Leave his suicide where it is, at the end of the corridor.” She lets the image fade, turning toward life and all its meaninglessness, accepting what Pavese had rejected.

The final lines of the novel bid farewell to Pavese’s hotel room, to his suicide: “The creaky little lift, the despair, the suicidal passion—it all ends there. As loneliness loses shape. Surrenders to a greater loneliness. To nothingness. And isn’t life only the wind, only the sky, only the leaves, and only nothing.” She leaves Pavese’s suicide behind, moving ahead toward what is next, to something beyond loneliness. In the end, Journey to the Edge of Life is less a literary pilgrimage than an exorcism. Özlü has written through her ghosts and memories and past readings, emerging with renewed capacity for life and its shapeless wanderings.