SURGICAL WARD 9
Peyami Safa
A Turkish classic with over twenty million copies sold, Peyami Safa’s masterpiece, Surgical Ward 9, is finally in English.
Istanbul, 1915. While the Ottoman Empire is in the thick of war and fighting for its life, an unnamed fifteen-year-old boy has his own pressing concerns: he suffers from severe bone tuberculosis and drifts from doctor to doctor, unwilling to follow their advice. As his incurable condition and resulting despair trap him in fevered, psychological seclusion, he seeks solace in his infatuation with an older girl, Nüzhet.
Surgical Ward 9 is a raw and honest account of a sick person’s inner world—his envy, longing, ambition, disappointment, terror, hope, and despair. This melancholic yet strangely vibrant book bears traces of Peyami Safa’s own childhood, and its power still endures today.
Excerpt:
How relieving it can be to share our troubles with another person, but not with mothers, not with mothers. Sorrow shared with a mother does not diminish, it multiplies. And a mother who experiences her child’s misfortune twice as acutely renders back her anguish to a disproportionate degree. That is how sorrow, bequeathed from child to mother, then mother to child, grows and grows.
“One of the first and finest authors to explore the East-West question in fiction.”
–Orhan Pamuk“A unique book about real pain and grief. When I finished reading it, I was stunned.”
–Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute“I’ve read Surgical Ward 9 three times, I can read thirty more and I definitely will.”
–Nâzım Hikmet
