Journey to the Edge of Life by the Turkish writer, Tezer Özlü is one of those books that feels less like a novel and more like being invited into someone is restless, searching mind. Originally written in German and later translated into Turkish and reshaped by Özlü herself, the book sits somewhere between a travelogue, memoir, literary diary, and philosophical meditation on life, death, love, alienation, and writing.
In 1982, Özlü travels across Europe by train, tracing the lives and deaths of the writers who shaped her inner world: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo, and Cesare Pavese. The original German title, On the Trail of a Suicide, makes her obsession clearer, though the later Turkish title, Journey to the Edge of Life, captures the book’s wider emotional and existential terrain. Journey to the Edge of Life is a pilgrimage to graves and a journey through memories, ideas, loneliness, and the quiet hope literature offers when life feels unbearable.
“Through my life it has been from the dead I’ve drawn my courage. The dead in whose stories I have lived. The dead who succeeded in turning this world of damnation into one where it became possible to live. The dead who in their writing have us everything in this world we could ever need.”
Özlü’s prose is fragmented, lyrical, and deeply introspective, often slipping into a stream of consciousness style. The book moves across cities: Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, Belgrade, Trieste, Turin, each one triggering reflections on love, alienation, poverty, history, and mental illness. Hotel rooms blur into thoughts, thoughts blur into memories, and literature is everywhere: Leonard Cohen songs hum in the background, Pavese’s words line the walls, Frida Kahlo’s books sit on coffee tables. In Tezer Özlü’s world, literature means survival. As Özlü writes, “I trust in literature, my true home.”
Her visit to Kafka’s grave in Prague is especially striking. She reflects on how Kafka’s stories shaped her far more than any physical place ever could, asking him quietly at his grave, “Have you found peace here?” The weight of history looms as she thinks of Kafka’s sisters, murdered in Nazi death camps, and how his early death spared him from witnessing that horror. “My one day in Prague was richer in experience than most seasons,” she writes, capturing how intensely she lives through her experience of being so close to the places once frequented by Kafka.
Trieste, Italo Svevo’s city, feels almost dreamlike to Özlü. Walking its streets feels like a privilege, streets she has already walked countless times in her thoughts. She visits Svevo’s grave in the Giardino Pubblico, where a monument to James Joyce stands just across from it. She meets Svevo’s elderly daughter, who once learned English from Joyce himself and who later lost her three sons in World War II. Özlü reflects on Svevo walking the streets of Turin with his young grandsons who were lost to the same war that sent Kafka’s sisters to their deaths.
For Özlü, books were the only escape: “How much I’ve longed to live like this, coming and going as I please.” Standing there on the streets of Trieste, she feels the imagined world become real: “All the people I brought to life in my imagination while reading Svevo’s books: they are here.”
Cesare Pavese is the emotional core of the book. Özlü feels an almost painful closeness to him, especially as she reads his biography while being the same age he was when he took his own life. Struggling with her own mental health and having spent time in psychiatric institutions, she finds solace and recognition in Pavese’s life and writing. “Why. What is it in my nature that drives me to draw him so deep inside?” she asks. Pavese, for her, is “a man who has come into this world to turn his surroundings into poetry,” a solitary figure who was “never allowed to love” and who explored life’s deepest depths in his books.
On her way to Turin, the city where Pavese lived and died, Özlü thinks of Dostoyevsky and the faith his books gave her and how they freed her from rigid ideas about the world. As she approaches the city, she feels unexpectedly happy, even elated. Yet Turin itself soon strikes her as oppressive and frightening, a city capable of bringing a person down. She visits Hotel Roma and room 305, where Pavese committed suicide on 27 August 1950, becoming the first person to ask to see the room since his death. She walks the streets of Turin wondering which cafés he loved most, where he preferred to write, and visits the Einaudi publishing house where he worked, as well as his final address on Via Lamarmora 35. She also visits Santo Stefano Belb where Pavese was born and where his grave is located. Özlü wants to be in the same places that Pavese used to frequent to understand the forces that shaped him, and by extension, herself.
Özlü’s nights in Turin are haunted not only by Pavese, but by Hemingway too, another writer whose life ended in suicide. She reads the Italian newspaper from 28 August 1950, reporting Pavese’s death, checks which films were playing in Turin cinemas on the day he died, and visits Platti, his favourite café. “That great man, so alone. This damned and damning world,” she writes, summing up both Pavese’s fate and the world that failed him. And yet, she also arrives at a quiet revelation: “Now I understand that literature has more life in it than life.”
Throughout the book, Özlü is sharply observant of the world around her. Traveling through 1980s former Yugoslavia, she sees poverty, exhaustion, and displacement everywhere, writing of “inhumanely exhausted people” and noting that “to be forced abroad to make a living is the great scourge of our age.” Berlin, despite its cultural life, strikes her as “the loneliest city in the world.” Again, she returns to the feeling of being out of step with ordinary life: “The older I get, the greater the gulf between me and these people in their cars and planes and offices.”
Love and loneliness are intertwined throughout the book. Özlü writes with painful clarity about how even love carries its own ending inside it, how longing follows us “all through life, or should I say, in the midst of life.” Rain, which she loves deeply and it “chimes with [her] inner life” becomes another quiet companion in her emotional landscape.
Journey to the Edge of Life is not a comforting read; it is intimate, raw, deeply moving. It belongs in the same emotional lineage of Clarice Lispector, Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pesso and Patti Smith’s writing where art and life blur into something inseparable. In her book, Özlü offers the sense that living “on the edge” of life, outside familiar norms, is still a way of living meaningfully. For those who find refuge in books, Özlü’s journey through literature, landscapes, and traditions feels painfully, beautifully familiar.
