Wild Roads

During a winter visit to Helsinki, a writer and inveterate traveller reflects on his recent journeys through the Far East and muses on the nature of travel itself. As his memories take him from country to country, his awareness deepens of both the unsettling rootlessness that lies behind his wanderlust, and the hurt and pain in the lives of most of the individuals he encounters along the way.

Meanwhile, in the background, the Finnish winter gives way to Malaysia’s sweltering heat, fading quietly into a crisp late autumn in Hong Kong, followed by Korea’s biting winds and the grey rains of Shanghai, until snow in Tokyo takes the narrator back to winter and Helsinki. Here, in a final chapter set in an imaginary museum devoted to his journeys, he finally confronts everything his ceaseless travelling has been designed to help him evade.

Wild Roads is at once a moody travelogue with a striking blend of detachment and cold lyricism, and a highly structured narrative that focuses on the ceaseless drifting of its central figure. It is an attempt to understand why we travel, what we are, and how our lives can come to seem like a collection of strange exhibits in yet another museum we have wandered into on a dull afternoon in a foreign city.

Table of Contents:
At the Field Marshal’s Home 11
The Phantom Dance Band 18
Café Safari 65
The Gwanghwamun Intersection 85
The Blue Lotus 136
Sayonara, Savkar-san 152
The Altinel Museum 201

About the Author :
Savkar Altinel was born in Istanbul. After completing secondary education there, he left Türkiye and studied English literature at the University of Chicago and the University of Glasgow. He then carved out a literary career for himself by continuing to live in Britain while writing in Turkish. A combination that could easily have turned him into the traditional victim “caught between two cultures” becomes, in his case, a source of strength that enables him to view everything with the cold, dispassionate gaze of a passing stranger. Widely recognised in his country of birth as a poet and a translator of English poetry whose range includes work by Donne, Coleridge, Kipling, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, he is also known for a number of genre-bending prose works deftly blending travel writing and auto-fiction. Sometimes compared to W. G. Sebald in this respect, but very much with preoccupations and a voice of his own, he is one of the most interesting and significant figures in contemporary Turkish literature.

Review :
“One of the best living poets in Turkish literature.”
—Orhan Pamuk


“Landscape turns into poetry under his gaze.”
—Literary Magazine Varlık