A journey towards the edge of life: traveling with three favorite male authors

Tezer Özlü, a woman writer who was lost to the Turkish Literary Community at an early age, was an admirer of three well known authors: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo and Cesare Pavese. Following are her memoirs from a voyage to the gravesites of these authors. Poignantly, the visits at the three graves became Özlü's own voyage “towards the edge of life.” At each grave, Özlü sensed strong relations between the life stories of the three authors, the life stories of their fictional characters and her own life story. For this reason, there are frequent quotations from the works of Kafka, Svevo and Pavese in Özlü's writings. Furthermore, the cities in which these authors lived had a great deal of influence on Özlü's works. She personified Torino in her narration of the suicide of Pavese, described Prague along with the labyrinths created in Kafka's novels and expressed Svevo's contradictory feelings about Trieste. Having produced a large number of significant works during her very short lifetime, Tezer Özlü passed away having bequeathed rich samples of 'intertextuality to Turkish literature.

Woman ,

Loneliness ,

Voyage ,

Cities ,

Time ,

Life ,

Meaning ,