Tahsin Yücel
1933-2016

Among Turkey's most celebrated novelists, Yücel has worked as a translator of French to Turkish. A member for many years of the French Language and Literature department at Istanbul University, he has received numerous awards in Turkey for his novels and short stories.

Skyscraper

2013
Paperback
231 p.

It is 2073, and Temel Diker plans to demolish whatever he finds in Istanbul that does not accord with his aesthetic sensibilities. For him, an ideal Istanbul would be a city of skyscrapers of uniform shape and height lining streets that are numbered, not named. The exception to this sameness will be a Statue of Liberty, many times the size of the original, with his mother's face. Meanwhile, the poor are driven from the city. Castaways, they forage for food, surviving as well as they can in a polluted environment. Temel hires Can Tezcan, a successful lawyer and erstwhile Marxist, to help him pursue his goals, which involve privatizing the justice system. Can, however, has remained friends with rebels from his youth and, through them, gradually learns of the social injustices that pervade his world and the sterility that underlies his client's vision.

Translated from the Turkish by Ender Gürol

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