A Mind at Peace

Blurb

A Mind at Peace is an iconic Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, one of the pioneers of literary modernism in Turkey. Tanpınar was a poet, novelist, and critic who worked as a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. Though he was known in his lifetime as a major poet, renowned scholar, and prolific essayist, he was not recognized as a major fiction writer until a decade after his death. It was in the context of the growing interest in the 19th- and early 20th-century Ottoman past that Tanpinar’s fiction was rediscovered and given new meaning. His subject matter has become relevant to contemporary interests and his aesthetic complexity is no longer objectionable. Today, he is considered to be an icon of Turkish literature and is an influence on many contemporary Turkish novelists, foremost among them Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.
A Mind at Peace first appeared in serial in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet. The novel is part of a multi-volume roman fleuve that includes the untranslated novels, Song in Mahur and Waiting in the Wings.