#RivetingReviews: Jennifer Sarha reviews WHAT REMAINS by Leylâ Erbil, translated by Alev Ersan, Amy Marie Spangler and Mark David Wyers

Leylâ Erbil (1931–2013) was one of Türkiye’s major contemporary writers. In addition to her six published novels, she wrote poetry and short stories as well as critical essays. Erbil was known for her innovative literary style, particularly her punctuation (there is the ‘Leylâ sign’, a triple comma (,,,), which Laya Genç in The Point magazine describes as ‘a grammatical middle finger meant to force readers to pause and ponder’) but also for her focus on the female gaze, and historical and sociological conflicts. Her novel A Strange Woman (originally published in 1971, translated into English in 2022 by Amy Marie Spangler and Nermin Menemencioglu) is now considered a modern classic.

What Remains is her masterpiece; a novel written in verse, experimental in style and ambitious in its treatment of history. The protagonist, Lahzen, is a restless thinker and wanderer of cities. Her thought pursues many topics, from the local and minute concerns of everyday people to political murders from the distant past to the present. (There is a helpful list of characters as well as explanatory notes at the end.) The voice of the speaker is multivocal and compelling: ‘I know each one of you is a different desperation’; ‘rapt in caresses/ trembling, illiterate in love’; ‘after all god placed the voices of a thousand different birds into the vocal cords of that man you hear in the radio’. In English this is rendered in free verse, so carefully crafted that you can hear the breaths and the pauses, the internal rhythms that they reveal. You could read the whole thing out loud and it would be a joy. The three translators took over ten years to complete their work, jointly revising and editing, and the end result is a marvellous achievement.

The novel shows a repeated and reverberating focus on stones; and on the city or cities that lie under modern Istanbul and other cities, the communities and languages and peoples who lived there before. In her travels Lahzen seeks out and ponders the history of the landscape she is experiencing; the 3000-year-old stone – Urartian or Assyrian or Greek – that is all that remains of the cultures of the land now constituted by the nation state of Türkiye; a metaphor but also an archaeological reality. In a stunning and evocative detail, Lahzen likes to press her cheek against the cheeks of old statues – for which she is scolded, told that this makes her both crazy and un-Islamic. Yet what a wonderful manifesto of yearning this is, an insistence on exposing these ruins under the city and the country. An absolute act of resistance to monoculturalism and monolithic historical thinking.

and beneath the remains

further beneath

further still

nestled together, the souls of dead cities

leading down into endless layers of the past

this merciless city

assailed by our civilization’

Reviewed by Jennifer Sarha

WHAT REMAINS

Written by Leylâ Erbil

Translated by Alev Ersan, Amy Marie Spangler and Mark David Wyers

Published by Deep Vellum Publishing (2025)

September 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Jennifer Sarha is a Finnish writer and scholar based in Luxembourg. She has an unmentionable day job, but her spare time is dedicated to literary and historical pursuits; reading voraciously in many languages and in translation.

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