Surgical ward 9 by Peyami Safa

Surgical Ward 9 by Peyami Safa

Turkish fiction

Original title – Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu

Translator – Ralph Hubbell

Source review copy

I was sent a number of the first books from the English arm of a Turkish publisher, Thousand Horsemen Press, in this country.  They have published four books, and this slim volume is considered a classic in Turkey.  This book is perhaps one of the fifteen novels Peyami Safa wrote, his most personal and best-known work, as it is a reflection on his own childhood, during which he also had bone tuberculosis in his right arm.  His book has been taught in schools in Turkey and made into films. He had a close working relationship with his fellow writer, Nazim Hikmet . He also translated a number of books from French and had a good knowledge of Arabic. A writer who should be better known in English.  This is the first translation of this book into English.

I too was one of them, and there was no one older than me. I was the only patient there suffering from an idiopathic disease, which I had had since I was eight.

I had spent years waiting outside that examination room, and others just like it. Never once accompanied by a grown-up, I would walk alone through the hospital’s wrought iron gate and make my way towards the ninth

‘surgical ward, envious of the very health of the grounds’ sturdy trees. The strange bright glare of the entrance’s windows would then strike my eyes and churn my stomach with fear, I would enter the passageway and sit off to the side alone, barely stirring, staying quiet, waiting, petrified to the point where I could feel the colour draining from my face.

from a section called troubles of a solitary child

captures the despair of sitting waiting

The book follows our narrator, who is 15 and is stuck in the hospital as he has bone tuberculosis in his right leg. The problem is that the doctors don’t know really what to do; some are nice, others are not. This is a boy stuck with a lot of pain, and the book is told in episodic parts. What happens is he sees a girl, Nüzhet, in the hospital. Seh shines for this boy; she is something different for him.  This girl awakens a dying boy.  This is what happens when you are dying, but then a wonderful light enters your life. The way he describes her, you feel this may have happened to the writer himself. Of course, his narrator in the book has a much worse case than the writer himself did, but there is a sense of time spent in the hospital.  He is well-read for a young man of fifteen. At times, the way he talks with his doctors shows that.  He has few options, will he leave the hospital?

Naturally, a girl wants to be happy.

I keep trying to tell myself this very basic fact. Even in my daydreams, my faltering logic comes to the same con-clusion, but then I begin to reason against it again as if I still need to be convinced.

Suddenly, the unbelievable: I hear something. The sound of someone knocking on the door. I do not believe it at first, but I listen carefully. It’s true.

“Who is it?” I said.

A low voice: “It’s me. Are you asleep? Can I come in?” Nüzhet! Nüzhet in the middle of the night! I could

only mouth the word, “Yes.”

“Can I come in?” she asked again.

Amazed, I sat upright in my bed:

“Yes!” I said.

She opened the door.

She wore a shawl draped over her nightshirt. Her feet,

inside her slippers, were bare.

She walked boldly over to the bed, an act so daring it caused me to feel the intensity of her fright. She looked at me and laughed.

Nuzhet as he views her !

This is a book that can be read in a single evening. I read it in two sittings, as I was so caught up in what was happening to the narrator and in how this girl lit up his world.  She may not be the best person, but there is a sense that this one figure is his hope at this one time. A boy discovering himself . A country struggling in the middle of a war and a sick boy stuck in a hospital jump off the page; you sense this is more auto-fiction, a legacy instead of an arm, some of the options the narrator has to face feel like those the writer may have faced. Did he have a Nuzhet light up his world ? I felt this book salos had a nod towards modernism the way we our in our narrators thoughts called Mrs Dalloway and maybe even something like Hunger by Knut Hamsum it captures a psychological feel to the narrative that the book shares with both the books I have mentioned also he translated french fiction so Proust for the ilness side of the book may have been an inspiration for his writing. It is a gem of a book that has also been made into a film. Maybe the best line is this from his friend Nãzim Hiket “I’ve read Peyami’s latest novel three times, I can read thirty more, I definitely will” High praise!