LOJMAN

A Kurdish family is trapped in a mother’s madness.

Ojen, a film and television actor, sets her bleak third novel—the first to be translated into English—in a desolate village in her native Turkey. A storm rages, and Selma is snowbound in a small, rudimentary lojman, a house provided by the government for her husband, Metin, the elementary school’s teacher. The house is isolated, “a forgotten dot on the village’s suffocating landscape, distant and alone under the dark clouds,” and Metin has gone off, leaving her with their pubescent daughter, Görkem, their young son, Murat, and the baby to whom she gives birth as the novel opens. Ojen conveys in visceral detail the anguish of the family’s claustrophobic imprisonment in the “crushing grayness” of the lojman, where the storm’s rage echoes the rage within: Görkem hates her mother, whose moods veer from “unanticipated bliss” to violent anger. And Selma, longing for passion, poetry, and freedom, feels nothing but hatred for her children: “Her children were parasites!” she thinks. “They were nothing but maggots that had first depleted her calcium deposits, then plundered the most sensitive parts of her soul to take them as their own, pinning the features of her body onto theirs.” She resents caring for them, even feeding them. She sees Görkem as “a monster who always demanded more of everything. Of food, love, anger, forgiveness, enmity.” Her hungry infant seems to suck her dry. It is the gentle Murat who soothes the baby when his mother, and sister, refuse to care for him. Day by day, as the weather becomes increasingly brutal, Selma descends into madness: “She felt like a shipwreck lodged in the deep, dark seafloor. Caught in the tides of her thoughts, watching her life force wither.” The children are caught, too, as is the reader, spiraling into a surreal world.

A stark, grim portrait of despair.