Tranquility

About this book

Tranquility is not just a novel, but a complex journey into inner worlds and characters searching for salvation in an eroding time. Novelist Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar—through Alaa Fathy's translation—takes us to old Istanbul, where exhausted souls live under one roof in a house breathing sorrow and anxiety. The novel follows the life of Mumtaz, the young man who finds himself facing the illnesses of his family and their aborted dreams, and his inner struggle with thoughts that find no outlet. It is a tale of human fragility and the absurdity surrounding us. Mumtaz cares for his sick cousin Ihsan, who battles acute pneumonia, and in this atmosphere heavy with illness and anticipation, the threads of the story begin to intertwine, revealing a whole life of losses and the search for meaning. The secondary characters—like the little girl Sabeeha who carries on her shoulders what is bigger than her age, and Nouran who lives far from her reality—all add layers of psychological depth to the work, making it a mosaic of broken souls trying to find peace in a world teeming with chaos. The novel shows how life in this.