The Stone Building and Other Places by Sevinç Türkkan

why he is internationally renowned. Those hoping for something truly fresh may very well experience a sense of emptiness . . . as do the men without women. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Madeleine Thien. Dogs at the Perimeter. New York. W. W. Norton. 2017. 272 pages. Dogs at the Perimeter is the second novel by Madeleine Thien. Her first novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Dogs at the Perimeter weaves between time and geographic area, with some chapters set in modern-day Canada and others set in 1970s Cambodia, when the Khmer Rouge was restructuring the country. When the narrator, Janie, was a child, her family was uprooted by the Khmer Rouge and became refugees. Janie was later adopted by a Canadian family and eventually became a scientist. When her colleague and close friend, a neuroscientist named Hiroji, suddenly disappears, she begins her search for answers. She reads his case files and sees how the brain is both mysterious and fragile, especially when it experiences trauma. Janie realizes that Hiroji must have traveled to Cambodia in search of his brother, a doctor who became lost after being sent there in the 1970s. Hiroji’s mission to find his brother brings out memories of trauma that Janie and her family experienced in Cambodia. Through the parallel stories of Hiroji and Janie, the reader meets characters who have been victimized by separation and violence, and their trials show the unbending human spirit. Thien does not offer the story in a straightforward way; instead she uses patient files, letters, and memories. In this way, the reader receives fragments, with the clear picture coming together only after all the narrative pieces fit together. This style of storytelling mirrors the brain. Just as the mind does not think linearly, the story is also not linear. Although the reader must wait to get the full picture, the characters are captivating from page one, and the details of their lives are worth waiting for. The trials that Janie’s family go through test each and every dark impulse that may exist within them, and their perseverance is one of the most compelling aspects of the novel. Despite Janie having a new family in Canada, she is still affected by trauma and finds it impossible to completely leave Cambodia and her childhood behind. It is through her eyes that the reader experiences the history, resilience, and heart of the Cambodian people. Amy Lantrip University of Colorado Boulder Aslı Erdoğan. The Stone Building and Other Places. Trans. Sevinç Türkkan. San Francisco. City Lights. 2017. 128 pages. Contemporary Turkish writer and journalist Aslı Erdoğan’s new short-story collection , The Stone Building and Other Places, which won the prestigious Sait Faik Short Story Award in Turkey in 2010, brings together narratives of suffering, trauma, and isolation. Already a best-seller in Turkey with nine reprints, this collection includes one of Erdoğan’s most well-known stories, “Wooden Birds,” the recipient of the Deutsche Welle Prize, and previously translated into English by Nebile Direkçgil in 2005 for Words Without Borders. After her 1998 novel, The City in Crimson Cloak, The Stone Building and Other Places will be the second English translation of Erdoğan’s work. Divided into seven chapters, the titular work, “The Stone Building,” is the longest story in the collection and probably the most representative of the writer’s use of magical realism. While the protagonist, A., reappears in these chapters as a character who has suffered torture and imprisonment , it is the impressions, the ambience , that define these intertwining stories. Particularly, the theme of betrayal and symbols like the wind and the presence of labyrinths and cyclical time give the story its distinctive dreamlike tone. A stone building is made to work as a metaphor for torture and trauma. It entraps and haunts people who are severed from their past, repressed, wounded, and forced to exist in their fragmentary consciousness. In the writer’s own words, the stone building is a never-ending scream. This collection assembles a chorus of exiled people, refugees whose voices echo from unnamed Nordic countries, a forest in Germany, or

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