DEATH IN TROY

The emotional and sexual history of a deeply conflicted young villager is assembled from multiple testimony in this rather muddy 1991 novel by the late (1930–95) Turkish author (Night, 1994). It’s set in the early ’50s, when Mushfik Börecki’s moodiness, failed relationships with women, and intense closeness to his young cousin Suat and to the older (married man) Talha provoke both his own guilty ruminations and a crossfire of reminiscence and accusation from Mushfik’s hard-drinking, “righteous” father, his subservient mother and smug matriarchal aunt, the girl who thought Mushfik loved her, and various other villagers. Little else happens, in a claustrophobic fiction that fails to convince the reader that its pallid generic protagonist is interesting enough to warrant all the melodramatic attention that Karasu unaccountably focuses upon him.