Selected as the Best Novel of the Last Century: Turkish Novel on the List!

The German magazine Der Spiegel has chosen the 100 best novels of the last century. The list was chosen from novels written between 1925 and the present. Zülfü Livanel's novel ''The Eye of the Enger'' was the only Turkish book on the list!

The committee, consisting of literary scholar Eva Horn, critic Miryam Schellbach, writer Michael Maar and philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, selected the best 100 novels, featuring important writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jose Saramago and Haruki Murakami!

The Spiegel:

Turkish writer and composer Zülfü Livaneli tells this devastating story of a black palace slave stolen from Abyssinia and castrated at a young age.

What Does the Book Say?

In the novel, a German historian who starts working in Istanbul examines the documents he finds in the Istanbul University archives. These documents, which are the manuscripts of a harem ağa, tell the story of the harem ağa who wrote them. Captured in the desert by slave traders and brought to Istanbul, Abyssinian Süleyman was castrated on the way and sold to the palace in the slave market. The slave rises to the position of harem ağa in the palace.

When the sultan, to whom the harem eunuch was very loyal, was dethroned and locked up in a harem chamber with a woman, the eunuch was tasked with taking care of his master's food and demands. While serving his master, Abyssinian Suleiman vacillated between seeing himself as a simple and worthless slave and as someone equal to the royal family. On the other hand, the Valide Sultan, who was obsessed with power, feared losing her dominance in the palace because her son had fallen in love with a woman and placed her seven-year-old grandson on the throne instead of her son. However, when she saw that her grandson listened to his mother instead of her, she tried to kill him, but failed and was punished for her attempt by being killed by the Janissaries.

The eunuch, who conveys the news from the palace to the former sultan, who lives in fear of death in the harem room where he is locked up, informs him that if he wishes, he can kill his son, who is sitting on the Ottoman throne, in order to regain power. The sultan, however, says that he cannot do such a heartless thing and decides to keep his son alive at the cost of his own death.

Source: Opposition