SURGICAL WARD 9
Peyami Safa
In the final days of World War I and the Ottoman Empire, an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy, suffering from severe bone tuberculosis, drifts from doctor to doctor, unwilling to follow their advice. As his despair and incurable condition trap him in a lonely, fevered solitude, he seeks solace in a platonic infatuation with an older girl, Nüzhet.
Surgical Ward 9 is one of the most raw and honest accounts ever written of a sick person’s inner world —his envy, longing, ambition, disappointment, terror, hope, and despair, all caused by his illness and frailty. This melancholic yet strangely vibrant fictional diary bears traces of Peyami Safa’s own childhood struggles, and its power still endures today.
Excerpt:
It is a blessing to share our misfortune with another, but not with mothers, absolutely not. The sorrows told to mothers are not shared but multiplied: mothers who feel their children’s misfortune doubly strongly, return this suffering to their children in abundance; so the sorrow grows larger and larger with each transition from mother to child and from child to mother.
“A unique book of the real pain and the grief.”
–Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, The author of The Time Regulation Institute“I’ve read Peyami’s latest novel three times, I can read thirty more and I definitely will.”
–Nâzım Hikmet, the author of Human Landscapes from My Country
- A Turkish Classic sold over 10 million copies since its first publication in 1930
- The most published and renowned title by Peyami Safa
- One of the “100 Must-Read Classics” in Turkey
- Praised by Turkish literature’s big names such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Nâzım Hikmet, and Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı
