Tezer Özlü had a reputation for being gloomy. “Sorrowful princess” was among her monikers. During my college years in Istanbul, in the early aughts, friends would be alarmed if a classmate had their nose in Özlü’s books for too long. Özlü, who died of breast cancer in her early 40s, obsessed over the flimsiness and frailty of human life. In her debut novel, Cold Nights of Childhood (1980), she wrote about chasing sexual and political freedom in Istanbul and her subsequent marginalization and institutionalization at the hands of heartless men. It’s hard not to think of dying or to consider one’s relation to death after an hour spent with Özlü’s texts. What is life worth in a world as cruel as ours? This was one of the questions that Cesare Pavese, the author Özlü revered most, tackled before his own early death, by suicide, in 1950.

In the summer of 1982, two years after Cold Nights of Childhood had been published in Turkey, Özlü was awarded a fellowship in Berlin, which she used to write a monograph on the Italian author’s death and the circumstances surrounding it—his political disillusionment as a Marxist in postwar Italy and his unrequited love for Constance Dowling, an American actress. When Auf den Spuren eines Selbstmords (On the Trail of a Suicide), the product of that residency, came out in German, it won the Marburg Prize for Literature. A year later, in 1984, Özlü rewrote the book in Turkish, reworking its sections, changing the title, and shifting the focus from Pavese’s biography to her own. The result, Journey to the Edge of Life, is a striking composite of literary biography, criticism, and autobiography that surely counts as one of her best works.

Pavese played a pivotal role in Özlü’s view of life. His death, she writes, became her guiding light as an artist. But she wondered why she was so drawn to his story; she wanted to find out how such a grim fate could invigorate her own work. Part of her explanation is political: Özlü shared Pavese’s Marxist beliefs, and like him, she was dismayed by the state of the Communist Party in her own country. She also believed that she had partly reincarnated the Italian poet and novelist—she was born seven years after Pavese’s death, a day after his birthday. When she wrote Journey to the Edge of Life, Özlü was 42, the same age Pavese took his life. She would die four years later.

After starting the book in Berlin, Özlü quickly set off on the road. She changed trains, stayed at hotels, slept with strangers, and made Pavese’s story an excuse for forging her own. Journey to the Edge of Life charts her travels from Berlin to Prague, Vienna, and Trieste. Her final destination was Turin, Pavese’s hometown.

Moving through the landscapes of Europe, Özlü tried to become one with her literary idol. Her tactic was to juxtapose (and at times even merge) what she experienced in the present with what Pavese had written in the past. His death, she insists early in the book, provided her with a reason to make art, to live and observe.

Before she arrived in Berlin, Özlü’s life had been difficult. She was only able to publish her first novel, to acclaim, after decades of struggle with narrow-minded editors who had a strict view of the political novel: that its characters had to be politicians, militants, and unionists. “I wanted to describe a shock with this novel,” Özlü said, “the shock of Western culture and education that an eleven-year-old child of a Turkish petty bourgeois family encountered in the Austrian School”—one of several foreign schools in Istanbul, where she studied until she was 20 years old. Özlü had also had two disastrous marriages in Turkey and was in and out of mental hospitals. Stuck in toxic relationships, unable to publish her work, and smoking as many as 60 cigarettes a day, Özlü experienced a transformation. “There was nothing else I could do,” she writes of those days when death became a central concern. “They tried to take away my freedom of movement. They never succeeded.”

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Faced with animosity and oppression, Özlü drew her courage from the dead. About Pavese, she writes: “No one has ever traveled to death as beautifully as you, or so fully alive.” She had read his books obsessively in Istanbul and noted how an observation by the Italian author particularly resonated with her: “Every road has a very precise trait…. Every hill has a human personality.” Özlü recalls having the same thought when she’d visited Nice years before, walking its boulevards “from one to the next, in search of the Mediterranean.” On another trip, this time to Genoa, she’d seen one gray street after another and, “choked by exhaust fumes,” read the graffiti, “thinking how very much this place reminded you of Istanbul.”

Geography became an objective correlative for her: Sidewalks, stairs, and squares embodied her mood. Journey to the Edge of Life zigzags in this fashion—between the towns the author has traveled, the one she is visiting now, and Istanbul, the city she can never leave. The superimposition produces curious results, revealing both the sameness and the difference of these various towns and brimming with a manic energy that flows throughout. “Words and languages, they can no longer contain me,” Özlü writes.

A hatred of the haute bourgeoisie is an underlying theme in the book. As Özlü watches the sun struggle to set behind the Berlin skyline on her balcony in the residency house on Storkwinkel, she spies Berliners parking their new, brightly colored cars. “The older I get,” she admits, ‘the greater the gulf between me and these people in their cars and planes and offices, buses, shops, and streets.” Taking a bus to Luftbrücke Field, she is struck by the warmth she feels for the bus driver (“What a lovely man”). In the following hours, she keeps thinking of this man, “driving his bus through the boulevards of Berlin.” She knows that she is at a residency, a recipient of the bourgeois generosity that has rewarded her literary success, but she can’t help but feel resentful all the same in this moment of personal and political crisis.

Berlin’s “straight walls” transport her back to the walls of Anatolian houses, “plaster over wood.” In those lackluster towns in central Turkey, walls serve to “stop time and speak of childhood fears” to her. Now, in Berlin, the “loneliest city in the world,” ringed by walls and “people who are strangers to themselves,” Özlü feels surrounded by these lonely figures on the street. They strengthen her resolve not to become one of those old women who “eat chocolate cake and wait for death.”

Özlü’s pilgrimage to Pavese’s grave is filled with detours, and by the end of Journey to the Edge of Life, she has made three literary journeys. On the train to Prague, she meets a man who tells her, tongue in cheek, that she won’t see anything in the city at five in the morning, “except for workers heading joyously to work.” Her exploration of the city with the man has no purpose at first (she spots a McDonald’s, a dark sign of the city’s transformation), but then she finds herself in the early-morning hours at the birthplace of another of her literary idols: “It’s not yet six, and I am outside the house where Kafka was born. On the wall before me, a metal sculpture showing Kafka’s thin face. Suddenly I’m not at all tired.”

Kafka’s building turns out to be closed for the day, and Özlü will be gone tomorrow, so she has missed her chance. Then she goes to see his grave. “Just inside, an arrow shows you where you need to go. Dr. Franz Kafka. Never has the end of life seemed more distant.” What Özlü terms the “wild green silence” of the place makes her forget the world and its indignities: “Have you found peace here beside his grave knowing it was here in this world that Kafka suffered such pain.” She thinks of Kafka’s letter to his father and feels sad to think how the “father who bore down on him all his life is now lying on top of him in his grave.”

Özlü spent her youth in a country that was increasingly politicized and polarized. On the one side were Turkish fascists who hated the likes of Özlü, and on the other were Marxist internationalists who, at times, could suffer from an inclination to violent patriarchal behavior. Özlü’s heart was with the Marxists, but she was a loner temperamentally. She tried to combine her interests in literature and politics in her writing, translating Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries and Ossip Pjatnizki’s book Memoirs of a Bolshevik into Turkish and working for an Istanbul branch of the Goethe Institute.

A bloody, US-supported coup had transformed Turkey, making life unlivable for Özlü and her compatriots: The 1980–83 military junta quashed political dissent, revoked civil liberties, and made prominent an Islamic nationalist discourse, a synthesis that would evolve into Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic AK Party in the years to come. “This is not our country; it is the country of those who want to kill us,” Özlü said of Turkey at the time.

Although Journey to the Edge of Life doesn’t directly mention the junta’s rule, this historical context offers some explanation as to why Özlü left for Berlin and was so focused on death: Some 650,000 people were detained by the junta and 300 of them died, 171 under torture and 48 executed by hanging, as she wrote her book on Pavese.

Reading Italo Svevo, another of her favorite authors, for the first time in Istanbul, “beset on all sides” by the city’s “unbearable chaos,” Özlü had “envied his heroes as they walked the boulevards of Trieste.” She recalls the seemingly endless violence in the city in those days as she read Svevo—“No day, no night, without gun-fire. With every new moment, another death. The only escape from the hell that was Istanbul was in books”—and how she was given a renewed appreciation for Svevo experiencing his own city in the flesh: “And now, to walk those streets.” In Trieste, she returns to Zeno’s Consciousness and remembers how it has haunted her: “Literature’s deep waters, churning with love and contradiction, pain, tears, and suicides. I trust them. I trust in literature, my true home.”

On the road to Trieste, Özlü meets a Greek boy, with hair “cut like John Travolta’s,” on his way from Thessaloniki to Turin to see a concert by the Rolling Stones. “I rest my tired, heavy, aching head on the shoulder of a twenty-year-old man,” she writes. “He gives me back my youth, so that I can endure this night.” She plans to visit the Piazza Unità d’Italia and Svevo’s streets with him. “This young man, who doesn’t know a thing about me, shows me more affection than any of the men I’ve ever held close.”

The Trieste section packs a surprise for the reader: Özlü has arranged an interview with Svevo’s 84-year-old daughter, Letizia, whom the locals adore. As Özlü approaches her grand blue-gray mansion, a “house of the haute bourgeoisie” on Via Principe di Montfort 12, she observes how its square is a “world unto itself. A world of stones, cars, asphalt, pedestrians, card players, flags, cafés, and Celentano.” Svevo’s daughter, now an elegant older woman, charms her: They chat about James Joyce, who gave Letizia English lessons in Zurich during the First World War. Joyce also taught her father English when he was a teacher in Trieste.

A capsule biography of Svevo follows, detailing how the Italian writer worked in the Union Bank while reading prodigiously in German, English, and French. His first encounter with literature was through German writers before he turned to the Russians. This brings Özlü back to her childhood memories. At age 13, she began reading Dostoyevsky and Gogol, and “after that, I entered Kafka’s boundless world. But it was the books by [Svevo] and Pavese that quenched my thirst and made my world whole.”

Before he died from lung disease, Svevo told his daughter, ”Don’t cry, Letizia. Don’t cry. It’s nothing. Death is nothing.” Alone in a café, Özlü returns to his last words and recalls how, a week before, she had been sitting beneath a tree next to Kafka’s grave. Now she is at another grave—Svevo’s.

Despite the incessant presence of death and loss, Özlü’s books remain invigorating and bracing. There is no Turkish writer whose eyes were more open to the suffocating patterns of Turkish nationalism than her. Throttled by Turkish patriarchy from an early age, Özlü visited her traumatic memories from childhood constantly, in a beautifully repetitive pattern, in two of her best-known books. Those were well-kept secrets among Turkish bookworms until Cold Nights of Childhood came out two springs ago in English, in a lucid translation by Maureen Freely. Freely has now done Anglophone readers another excellent service by bringing Journey to the Edge of Life into English with a similarly captivating, staccato, melancholy prose.

Özlü’s book concludes with her trip to Turin. Crossing cornfields and thinking of all the countries she has left behind, she revels in her growing independence. She reaches Turin on July 14, 1982, and realizes that “there is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.” It starts to rain as her train enters Turin; at around nine in the morning, she reaches Santo Stefano Belbo, where many of Pavese’s stories are set.

Sitting in Santo Stefano Belbo, Özlü reflects on the fact that she has come here “to stop living inside literature. Before I got here, I believed that life was stronger than literature, and I was determined to experience as much of it as I could.” Unable to extract herself from literature before, she now sees that “literature has more life in it than life, and that life is its seedbed.” Literature, for Özlü, is born of pessimism, and it provided a welcome refuge for her in a moment of crisis for her country.

She finds Pavese’s suicide reflected in his surroundings, in the avenues he walked from his home to Einaudi, the Italian publisher where he worked as an editor. She counts the steps between the places he’d frequented—the Turin station, Einaudi, and Platti, his favorite corner café, where “everything remains as it was in 1880”—to enter his state of mind. At the Hotel Roma, where Pavese took his intentional overdose, she sees in its dark corridors “no way back from death. Room 305, the room where he took his life, is at the very end of the suicide corridor.” Finally, having reached the final stop on her pilgrimage, she writes: “The distance between us closes. He wraps his being around mine. My life in time, and forever. His suicide eternal. And I, in its eternal embrace.”

On the evening of August 27, 1950, at the Hotel Roma, Pavese swallowed 22 sleeping pills. A maid found him at 8:30 the next morning when she entered the room with a cat; he was on the bed, wearing his suit. “He’d only taken off his shoes,” Özlü writes. She returns, again, to Svevo’s last words to his daughter: “Death is nothing. Nothing at all.”

But death continued to haunt her. Özlü spent the final years of her short life in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy for various political, philosophical, and health-related reasons. She was in regular correspondence with Leylâ Erbil, her sole comrade in Turkish literature and the first female writer from Turkey to be nominated for a Nobel Prize. She, like Özlü, was a committed leftist, and she, too, disdained much of Turkey’s male-dominated literary world. Özlü sent a postcard to Erbil in which she detailed the love affair she’d had with Hans Peter Marti, a young Swedish artist she’d met in Berlin, who took good care of Özlü in her final years.

At one point in Journey to the Edge of Life, Özlü recalls the words of her brother, Demir Özlü, another novelist who’d spent much of his life in prison and in exile, on the run from the Turkish state. On an icy night in Berlin, as they waited for a bus on a bridge outside Zoo Station, Demir suddenly told her, “We have to find ourselves a burial plot in Istanbul.” Özlü’s answer to him was blunt: “I don’t care where I’m buried. I don’t even want to think about what happens to my body. Leave it to dissolve into the earth or into water, or ash.” But the morbid image later gave her another thought: Shortly before she began her “pilgrimage to the graves of the writers who have made me who I am,” she decided that her brother was right, but that she didn’t “want my grave to be in Istanbul.” In the end, the decision wasn’t hers, as often happened during her brief life. After she died in Zurich in February 1986, Özlü was buried in Istanbul, the city she’d attempted to flee all her life but refused to let go.