Endgame
A Novel
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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An unnamed author is consumed by a small-town conspiracy in this existential noir by the award-winning Turkish author of Like a Sword Wound.
Named one of Washington Post's 50 Notable Books of 2017
In Endgame, award-winning author and Turkish political dissident Ahmet Altan has crafted an enigmatic literary noir exploring the ways corruption has overtaken contemporary Turkish life. With a dreamlike logic reminiscent of Paul Auster and Graham Greene, it tells the story of an unnamed man who arrives in a small town only to find himself involved in a mystery with existential implications (The Washington Post).
The protagonist, a womanizing writer who lived his entire life in the city, retires to a sunbaked Turkish village to enjoy the quiet. Instead, he encounters a world of suspicion, paranoia, and violence. The town's mayor is both his only ally and his greatest nemesis; his lover shares an ambiguous past with the mayor; the locals seem hell-bent on turning him into a murderer; and, he is initiated into the town's biggest secret only to discover this knowledge will become a weapon used against him. All the while, Altan's appealingly untrustworthy narrator transports the reader into a world of lust, ambition, small-town politics, and death.
"Endgame is a mystery adventure of such intimately written humanity that it transcends genre, time, and place. If Steinbeck had written The Godfather it might have read like this." —DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize–winning author of Vernon God Little
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Small-town tensions over an old secret boil over in this metaphysical noir by Altan (Four Seasons of Autumn). A nameless writer moves to a small and picturesque Turkish town to work on his next novel, but before he even gets off the plane he becomes enthralled with a beautiful, locally connected woman named Zuhal. Through her the writer forms relationships, including with Mustafa, the mayor of the town, who has a complicated past with Zuhal and occupies a strange role as both the writer's natural enemy and true friend. Over time, as the narrator becomes more involved with the citizens and local politics, he is drawn into crime, sex, and a legend involving a treasure on a hill. Interspersed throughout the narrative are existential discussions with God about the nature of writing, life, and the creation of characters. These passages serve to warn us that something horrible is coming, that the narrator will commit a terrible act. Altan's work is at once atmospheric and distant, with shifts from discussions with and about God to the narrator's abstruse relationships with the people of the town, particularly Zuhal. Still, each of the threads are artfully crafted and do come together nicely by the end, as promised. Altan's characters are, at times, difficult to penetrate, but his story is pointed, enigmatic, and difficult to forget.
