Deniz Utlu manages through a combination of recollection, research and literary imagination to reconstruct the life and death of a father figure. As a young man the father emigrated from South Anatolia via Istanbul to Germany, where he found work in Hanover, started a family, and came to feel at home. Two strokes and the resultant ‘locked in’ syndrome meant that for many years the father was able to communicate only by means of his eyes. His son now, as it were, summons up the conversation that he might have had with his father but which in reality scarcely if ever took place. He reconstructs his father’s origins in a Turkish-Arabic family in the Anatolian town Mardin; he describes or imagines how his parents came to meet each other, how his father managed to find his feet in a new country, and he recounts the complex consequences for the life of the family following the father’s illness and loss of the power of speech. On the surface Utlu’s novel is concerned with past origins and the move to a new environment, with family and the differences between generations, with the experience of being culturally well rooted or totally rootless; but on a more abstract and equally important level the novel is about the acquisition and loss of language and about the question as to whether remembrance is actually possible.
