Life Is a Caravanserai

This is a book that contains many books: a novel about a girl’s childhood and youth, the portrait of a country and its cities – Bursa, Ankara, Istanbul – where myth and modernity clash dramatically, a book about the weight of history, about the power of love and about Islam and its rituals and prayers.

With her foreign imagery, unfamiliar experiences and wonderful rhythms, Emine Sevgi Özdamar imbues the German language with something magical and it cannot be compared to anything in German literature. As artfully as she intertwines the myriad of stories and stories within stories, as naturally flows this language which seems to come from an oriental world where stories were still told and not written down.