#elif-shafak

#elif-shafak

Ilker Catak's Yellow Letters and Emin Alper's Salvation, two politically outspoken films that examine Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's autocratic regime, shared the top prizes at this year's Berlinale: the Golden Bear for Catak and Silver for Alper. These striking works share a lot more. Both titles are co-produced by Liman, an indie film company from Turkey.

Ruins, Child is constantly spliced and refracted, presenting a group of people watching a familiar film of themselves and their elders, while also assessing the beauty of crumbling buildings.

The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It's irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He's exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a dying river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: Is this thing I'm in really alive? By whose standards?

Her writing tends to be classified as virkelighetslitteratur, or "reality fiction," and for good reason. Hjorth makes Norway sound like a small town-the sort of place where your neighbors know you're home if they can see your footsteps in the snow-and the overlap between her life and work has more than once been the literary version of tabloid news there.

An officer showed her images of a woman being sexually assaulted. At first, she did not realize the woman in the photos was herself. Investigators discovered over 20,000 images of non-consensual sex. For 10 years, Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged his wife and, through the dark web, recruited men from their neighborhood to rape her while she was unconscious. He committed this abuse at least 200 times.

She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.

I think there's a deep loneliness to her life that cohabiting with her brother kept at bay-and, now that he's gone, she is forced to face it. As more of Kim's letters are delivered, Helen becomes invested in the narrative they form, as if she were piecing together a puzzle, one that, in some ways, echoes her own past. Kim's family is Muslim, from Pakistan.