The City in Crimson Cloak

From an “exceptionally sensitive and perceptive” Turkish writer and human rights activist (Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), the captivating story of a writer whose own autobiographical novel forces her to come to terms with the dichotomy of the city she once loved: Rio de Janeiro. O¨zgu¨r is a young woman on fire: poor, hungry, and on the verge of a mental breakdown. She has only one weapon: her ability to write the city that has robbed her of everything, Rio de Janeiro. Through the reading of the bits and pieces of O¨zgu¨r’s unfinished eponymous novel, with its autobiographical protagonist named O¨, O¨zgu¨r’s story begins to emerge. As O¨zgu¨r follows O¨ through the shanty towns, Condomble rituals, and the violence and sexuality of the streets of Rio, the reader follows O¨zgu¨r as she searches for a way to make peace with life, a route to catharsis. Together, the two concentric novels reveal the blurry borderline between the two Rio's -- one a metaphor for death, one a city of life. A major hit when it was released in Turkey and Europe, The City in Crimson Cloak is brilliantly evocative and wildly experimental, doing for Rio what Joyce did for Dublin.