Skyscraper

Fiction. Translated from the Turkish by Ender Gürol. It is 2073, and Temel Diker plans to demolish whatever he finds in Istanbul that does not accord with his aesthetic sensibilities. For him, an ideal Istanbul would be a city of skyscrapers of uniform shape and height lining streets that are numbered, not named. The exception to this sameness will be a Statue of Liberty, many times the size of the original, with his mother's face. Meanwhile, the poor are driven from the city. Castaways, they forage for food, surviving as well as they can in a polluted environment. Temel hires Can Tezcan, a successful lawyer and erstwhile Marxist, to help him pursue his goals, which involve privatizing the justice system. Can, however, has remained friends with rebels from his youth and, through them, gradually learns of the social injustices that pervade his world and the sterility that underlies his client's vision.<br> <br> In SKYSCRAPER, Tahsin Yücel brilliantly evokes a dystopic future in which people of means are enmeshed in lives of a dull sameness, while the poor are driven to fend for themselves in a polluted environment.