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Metis Fiction
Novel
13 x 19.5 cm, 232 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-063-3
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Prints:
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1st Print: 1979
7th Print: March 2006
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Download high resolution copy
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About the Author
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Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) graduated from the Philosophy Department of Istanbul University
and taught at Hacettepe University for many years. One of Turkey’s most respected
writers, Karasu published four books of short stories, three novels and four collections
of essays. His first novel Gece (Night) is the winner of the 1991 Pegasus
Literature Award; Uzun Sürmüş bir Günün Akşamı (The Evening of a Very Long
Day) won the 1971 Sait Faik Short Story Award, and the English translation of Karasu’s
Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (The Garden of Departed Cats) by Aron Aji was awarded
the 2004 National Translation Award in the USA.
Usually referred to as "the sage of Turkish
literature," Bilge Karasu is an influential reference point in the progress of Turkish
fiction writing. A perfectionist, a philosopher, and a master of literary arts,
he left behind a body of work, which, although intricately woven and at times obscure,
skillfully outlines a world unmatched in its crystal clear transparency. The fact
that he is labeled "the most difficult writer in the Turkish language" arises from
his uncompromising loyalty to pure literature, which he described as a structure
to be accomplished by a constant interaction between the writer and the reader.
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Other Books from Metis
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Troya'da Ölüm Vardı (Death in Troy, 1963
Uzun Sürmüş
Bir Günün Akşamı (The Evening of a Very Long Day),
1970
(The Evening of a Very Long Day),
1970
Kısmet Büfesi (The Kiosk Called Fate), 1982
Gece (Night),
1985
(Night), 1985
Kılavuz (The Guide), 1990
Ne Kitapsız Ne Kedisiz (Not Without Books Nor Without Cats), 1994
Narla İncire Gazel (Ode to the Pomegranate and the Fig), 1995
Altı Ay Bir Güz (Six Months and an Autumn), published post-mortem, 1996
Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu (Beyoğlu the Mother of Sewage), published post-mortem,
1999
Öteki Metinler (Other Texts), published post-mortem, 1999
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Bilge Karasu
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The Garden of Departed Cats
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Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi
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Rights sold / published by:
English: New Directions
German:
Literaturca
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Contents
Reviews
Excerpt
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A surreal, utterly unique novel.
In an ancient Mediterranean city, a tradition
is maintained: every ten years an archaic game of human chess is staged, the players
(visitors versus locals) bearing weapons. This archaic game, the central event of
The Garden of the Departed Cats, may prove as fatal as the deadly attraction
our narrator feels for the local man who is the Vizier, or Captain, of the home
team. Their "romance" (which, though inconclusive, magnetizes our protagonist to
accept the Vizier's challenge to play) provides the skeletal structure of this experimental
novel. Each of their brief interactions works as a single chapter. And interleaved
between their chapters are a dozen fable-like stories. The folk tale might concern
a 13th-century herbal that identifies a kind of tulip, a "red salamander," which
dooms anyone who eats it to never tell a lie ever again. Or the tale might be an
ancient story of a terrible stoat-like creature that feeds for years on the body
of whomever it sinks its claws into, like guilt. These strange fables work independently
of the main narrative but, in curious and unpredictable ways, (and reminiscent of
Primo Levi's The Periodic Table), they echo and double its chief themes:
love, its recalcitrance, its cat-like finickiness, and its refusal to be rushed.
The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness,
the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.
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The Garden of Departed Cats
The Prey
The Man Who Misses His Ride, Night After Night
A Medieval Monk
In Praise of the Fearless Porcupine
In Praise of the Crab
The Sun-Man of the Rainy City
The Man Walking in the Tunnel
"Kill Me, Master!"
Our Sea
Hurt Me Not
Red-Salamander
Another Peak
Where the Tale Also Rips Suddenly
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Joseph Dewey, Context
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"Nameless characters move about a cryptic text-scape, an elusive environment constructed
from the lyric energy of language, a symbolic world coaxed into depth, plots unhinged
from causality, rent by intrusive absurdities—these are disquieting fables that
are breathtakingly enthralling. …Karasu constructs form-intensive texts that calibrate
the force of his profound (and indignant) moral imagination."
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Roberta Micallef, AATT Bulletin, 2005
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"Many of the texts from the Middle East that are available in translation are highly
political texts. The Garden of Departed Cats is about a much more basic and
at once much larger question, interactions between the hunter and the hunted. Karasu
makes the reader wonder, question and doubt the very nature of love and humanity.
I found myself revisiting the text over and over again. Each time I discovered a
new layer, a new inter-pretation and a new depth to this amazing work by a master
wordsmith."
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First I looked at his hands.
His English sounded north European. He
could be German, Dutch or Scandinavian. Or perhaps Austrian, but that didn’t occur
to me. His accent evoked snow, lakes, pines, elk with tangled antlers. He spoke
little, but perhaps because of his accent, I started noticing that the color of
his hair was lighter than the dark chestnut shade I’d remembered from the night
before; if someone asked me now, I’d say he was blond.
Yet he had the hands of a Mediterranean.
Dark skin paler between the fingers, hands
lined with olive-green veins…
The beauty of his hands left an indelible
impression in my mind. The darkness rising like water from below covered us up to
our knees, but his face was still in the light. He looked swarthy, definitely so,
befitting the dark skin of his hands.
Yet, soon, in the last rays of the sun,
I would note –trembling with excitement– that I wasn’t mistaken about the golden
hue of his hair...
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