num_pages: 296
description: Life is a Caravanserai follows a lively, but rather unfortunate family from Istanbul to Bursa, then to Ankara and back to Istanbul. This is a women’s the mother, Fatma, nurtures her three children, with the grandmother Ayşe and the “aunties” of the neighbourhood, while Mustafa, the often unemployed father, recites Orhan Veli and drinks copious rakı, dreaming of building a larger family home. Here is the Turkey of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its political struggles, growing urbanisation, the Korean War, American comic books and the departure of the first wave of workers to Germany. The Anatolian grandparents carry with them their sagas of the war and the nascent Turkish Republic, enriched by wisdom, humour and village folklore.The author’s wonderful use of local narrative, storytelling, proverbs and prayers, and a prose that moves from the lyrical to gritty humour, re-creates this microcosm of neighbourhoods from a young girl’s intimate perspective. We follow her as she sits in school, visits relatives, dreams, listens to stories and experiments with early passions. Reality merges into mythological visions as, naïve, witty and explorative, she absorbs the colourful world around her.
language: English
title: Life Is a Caravanserai
titlecomplete: Life Is a Caravanserai
genres: Asia, Germany, 20th Century, Turkish, Womens, Turkish Literature, Literature, German Literature, Fiction, Magical Realism
ratings_count: 263
awards: awardedAt: 662716800000
name: Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur
category: Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis
publisher: Middlesex University Press