Описание: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, poet, novelist and critic, was a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. His Five Cities was first published in Turkish as Beş Şehir in 1946 and revised in 1960. It consists of five lyrical essays, each focused on a city significant in Anatolian history and in Tanpinars emotional life.
Part history, part autobiography, part poetic meditation on time and memory, Five Cities is Proustian in style, with a tension between a backward-looking melancholy and a concern for the unpredictable future of his country. Comparable to Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuks Istanbul: Memories of a City, Five Cities emphasizes personal attitudes and reactions but has a wider scope of geography, history and culture.
Ruth Christies translation of Beş Şehir makes the essays, which are as aesthetically appealing as a novel, available to readers of English for the first time.
