- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Semiotext(e) (Jun 1 1987)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0936756578
- ISBN-13: 978-0936756578
- Product Dimensions: 17.9 x 11.6 x 1.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,125,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Ayden is the traditional 'foreign'... an alien wherever he goes, probing and disfiguring ordinary reality, accepting its most peculiar and neurotic aspects as quite unexceptional. Through his eyes we see an 'Amerika' as odd as Kafka's; as funny and absurdly sad."
—Frank O'Hara
—Frank O'Hara
Product Description
I wonder if it is lustful
A tank in its dreams
What do airplanes think
When left alone?
We did not seek happiness
We invented sadness
Were we not of this world?
—Orhan Veli, epigram to Sadness at Leaving
During the 1960s and 70s, Turkish-born Erje Ayden served as house pulp fiction writer to the New York School of painters and poets. Friend and sometime bodyguard to the artist Willem De Kooning, Ayden self-published 7 pop novels, written in rapid amphetamine bursts in borrowed apartments and rooming houses. Sadness at Leaving, re-published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is Ayden's most autobiographical work—if one accepts, as he claims, that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government throughout those years.
East Berlin, 1959: Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he'll "sleep" as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name "April 23," Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden's hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl's eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he's called.
A tank in its dreams
What do airplanes think
When left alone?
We did not seek happiness
We invented sadness
Were we not of this world?
—Orhan Veli, epigram to Sadness at Leaving
During the 1960s and 70s, Turkish-born Erje Ayden served as house pulp fiction writer to the New York School of painters and poets. Friend and sometime bodyguard to the artist Willem De Kooning, Ayden self-published 7 pop novels, written in rapid amphetamine bursts in borrowed apartments and rooming houses. Sadness at Leaving, re-published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is Ayden's most autobiographical work—if one accepts, as he claims, that he worked as a spy for the Turkish government throughout those years.
East Berlin, 1959: Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he'll "sleep" as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name "April 23," Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden's hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl's eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he's called.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great,
By A Customer
This review is from: Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance (Paperback)
I thought this book was great. When I read it I didn't want to put it down. I recommend it to everyone.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
everything is real,
By Richard Turyn - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance (Paperback)
One wonders, what if any part of it has he lived? Only because we're all liars, but only the most charming of us (and isn't this what charms are all about?) are good enough to make us not care for at least a little while, about which stories are tied down to our metrocard daily lives, and which have taken flight on wings of imagination.Erje Ayden remains the stranger in a strange land of that strange era, the 60s. His characters in this strangest of spy stories - many of the 15-second walk-ons as well as his central sleeper agent, his stalinist rival and the woman who adapted to both of them in turn - vibrate with a throbbing half-life that testifies to the lives they have sacrificed in secret service to national gods. But it is a real story in every way that matters, picked out in a hunt-and-peck typewritten shorthand. Like so many of the real stories of secret, wasted lives and the ruined plans they hatched, it ends badly. But somehow it exalts the reader, just to have known these two-dimensional characters and the version of their creator that lived while he was creating them. And is leaves us with only one question. Where is Erje Ayden now? 2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Sadness at Leaving: An Espionage Romance (Paperback)
I thought this book was great. When I read it I didn't want to put it down. I recommend it to everyone.
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