Nefaset Lokantası

“Remembering is the thinking of the heart. Let your heart think. Remember.”

He did not understand those who found existence meaningless. For him, the problem with existence was not that it was ultimately meaningless but that it was too meaningful. What was hard to bear was not its meaninglessness, but its endless meanings. Who knows what intrigues were going on in the heads of these calmly walking people, what cataclysms were going on in their souls, who knows what miraculous struggle they were putting up to hide the murderers, the victims, the scholars and the vulgar people inside their bodies.

One month ago, for sixteen years. Another "beginning of the end" awaits journalist Salih, who decided to leave Turkey and settle in Rio de Janeiro after being fired from the newspaper he worked for, at the farewell dinner organized by the owners of the restaurant, who have almost become his family, at Nefaset Restaurant, where he has been a regular for years.

Salih's dream of leaving "a poisoned land", as he puts it, first gets stuck in a past love story, then in his childhood story. In this journey to the past in the labyrinths of memory, the intertwined fragments of time, on the one hand, contaminate the present and leave it hanging in an uncertain void, and on the other hand, blur the future.

Tugba Doğan, whom we know with Musa's Sleep, presents our present with her second book, Nefaset Lokantası. While dealing with the dilemmas of the individual struggling with the concrete realities of life in Turkey from the perspective of the main character Salih, he also includes the inner feeling of existence expressed in the grip of the duality of time and geography into the narrative.

If a person's desire, geography is destiny.

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Dough Type: 2. Dough

Number of Pages: 128

Size: 13.5 x 21

First Print Year: 2019

Number of Prints: 1. Printing