'Motherland Hotel' by Yusuf Atılgan

'Motherland Hotel' by Yusuf Atılgan, translated by Fred Stark (City Lights, 152 pages, $15.95)

"Motherland Hotel" is the only novel by Turkish author Yusuf Atılgan yet translated into English. At barely 150 pages it is a minor masterpiece: The dark story of one man's descent into madness, convulsed by sexual obsession and social isolation. Atılgan has been compared to Camus and Faulkner, but above all "Motherland Hotel" evokes a kind of Turkish version of The Shining. 

The book was published in 1973, and this nimble English translation by the late Fred Stark first appeared in 1977. It has just been republished by City Lights, carrying the kind of Orhan Pamuk jacket quote coveted by every publisher: "I love Yusuf Atilgan; he manages to remain local although he benefits from Faulkner's works and the Western traditions." 

The story follows Zebercet, a middle-aged loner who runs a small rundown hotel near a train station in İzmir, inherited from his grandfather. Visitors to the hotel include villagers, tobacco farmers, party delegates, dentists, newly enlisted soldiers, marketplace vendors, livestock dealers, teachers, students, lawyers, prostitutes, touring actors, and one-night couples. Zebercet is "serious and patient" but alienated from society, having no friends and making no visits to the restaurant or cinema. His life follows a mundane daily pattern, structured by daily administrative tasks and routine, passionless sexual liaisons with the hotel maid. 

This tedious life is dramatically interrupted by the one-night stay of an alluring woman visiting from the capital, referred to only as "the woman off the Ankara train." When she leaves in the morning she tells him that she is visiting relatives in the country and will...