Motherland Hotel

Descent into madness is swift in Turkish literary pioneer Atilgan’s novel, first published in his home country in 1973. Dutiful hotelier Zeberjet lapses often into harried, solipsistic fits after spending most of his life as a “serious and patient” (if not particularly upstanding) bore in Izmir. Attending carefully to the bookkeeping and clerkship at the titular hotel—a converted estate passed to him by his grandfather—he forces himself on the hotel’s resigned maid, skims a pittance from the business’s proceeds, and passes room keys to travelers and johns alike, withholding judgment based less on a live-and-let-live philosophy than an apparent lack of interest. When a mysterious female guest leaves a bath towel behind, Zeberjet becomes increasingly engrossed in the possibility of seeing her again. As the obsession grows, he starts to break from his routines, ditching work to play flaneur, eavesdropping on strangers in town, attending a cockfight, and briefly entertaining the courtship of a young man. As a history of familial bad luck and sexual trauma is unraveled, Zeberjet’s slide—from minor, private invention to antisocial eruption—begins to seem fated. Automatic writing diehards will cherish the Woolfian outbursts Atilgan churns into the straightforward prose, though in Stark’s translation—completed back in 1977—the digressions occasionally succumb to an incoherence. (Oct.)