The City in Crimson Cloak - Softcover

"Asli Erdogan's hands touch the human heart. Some of her sentences are verses of poetry...saturated with the bitter juice of life. Read this novel slowly, take your time, otherwise, you will be overwhelmed by the crossfire of images and metaphors." -- Cumhuriyet Book Review, Turkey

Asli Erdogan is an exceptionally sensitive and perceptive writer who gives us perfect literary texts. -- Orhan Pamuk

In language both limpid and lyrical, Asli Erdogan perfectly delineates the distance between [the protagonist] and the foreign city...It's the Brazilian street which rules this novel with the romantic savagery of the favela and the bandit, its love of life, its roughness, its disgust..." -- Le Monde, France

The description in Asli Erdogan's novel is breathtaking. The work is so much like its setting. Deep. Complicated. Raw. Difficult. Musical. I never wanted to leave a scene yet I couldn't wait for the next. This is a truly fine book. -- Percival Everett

Turkish Pepper, Brazilian Heat: [B]eyond a doubt the best I have reviewed this autumn. Overwhelming... In the same way that Dublin and Joyce belong together, or Praha and Kafka, for me from now on Rio will be inextricably bound together with the name Asli Erdogan. With this volume she writes herself into the dominant tradition of the last century's novels: the novel of the city." -- Aftenposten, Norway

Turkish author Erdogan vividly captures the life and sin of underclass Rio de Janeiro in this darkly atmospheric novel, published in Turkey in 1998. A native of Istanbul, Özgür has spent the past two years barely surviving in Rio, a city overflowing with debauchery and violence. Lonely, penurious and hungry, Özgür's only solace is writing, and she has committed herself to staying in Rio until she does the city justice in her own book, The City in Crimson Cloak, which here becomes a novel within a novel. On the city's Fireworks Day, she makes her way through the favelas, or slums, gathering impressions of the chaos and carnality while recalling pieces of her autobiographical novel and journal entries. Özgür's battle to hold on to her own reality makes for a stark, nightmarish journey.
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