The Garden of the Departed Cats Paperback – January 12, 2004

Translated from the Turkish, this work is more a collection of stories and fables than a novel. Most were written in the 1960's and 1970's. (The author died in 1995.) One fable of the main character recruited into a live village chess game stitches the stories together. A lot of the stories remind me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut or even the old TV series, Twilight Zone: a man waits day after day for a bus that never comes; a traveling monk has an animal attached to his bowels; a tourist gets trapped in an endless tunnel under beach-side cliffs; a trapeze artist has premonitions of when his fellow-artists will die; an at first island grows, then sinks under the sea while the inhabitants frantically dig out their harbor; a scientist experiments with a plant that takes away the ability of people to lie. Certain themes reappear: the lonely male intellectual; the traveler; the sea. Some of the stories are good but, all in all, the book is a bit of a chore to read.

Great book, great author, great translation.