Hayat Erdoğan: The main thing is no zeitgeist

In the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, a devastating earthquake rocks southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. As images of destroyed cities, sirens, and dust flicker across the screens, the narrator’s life is also thrown into turmoil. In a tender odyssey of grief, she delves into her memories: her childhood in Turkey, mythological journeys, declarations of love on mountains—and her mother, whose life is marked by silence, work, and violence. With a keen eye and deep emotion, the narrator reflects on moments past. She sifts through archives, voice messages, photographs, notebooks, languages, memories, and history. She searches for stories that connect us, for a language of closeness. Modelled after Homer’s epic, this novel unfolds in 24 cantos spanning 24 hours. Yet at its center stands not a hero, but a woman who remains—who does not conquer and move on, but observes, thinks, remembers—and seeks to understand. Just as James Joyce once condensed Homer’s Odyssey into a single day in his novel *Ulysses*, here too a single day becomes a literary journey around the world. The main thing is that no zeitgeist continues to write the myth—but rather, a female counter-narrative. With poetic precision and existential force, Hayat Erdoğan tells of the female experience, of cracks in the earth and in the heart. Of fractures in private life, in families, in societies, and in our perception of the world.