Category: Uncategorized

Introduction

Odette is a 1950 British war film based on the true story of Special Operations Executive French agent, Odette Sansom, living in England, who was captured by the Germans in 1943, condemned to death and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp to be executed.

However, against all odds she survived the war and testified against the prison guards at the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials. She was awarded the George Cross in 1946; the first woman ever to receive the award, and the only woman who has been awarded it while still alive.

Also known as Odette – Agent 23 or Odette – Agent S.23.

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Outline

In response to a radio broadcast request for photographs of France, mother of three Odette Sansom sends a letter to the Admiralty, but an addressing mistake brings her to the attention of the Special Operations Executive, who need French people to go back to their homeland…

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside

Translated by Ümit Hussein

Burhan Sönmez is a Kurdish novelist and lawyer from Turkey who is a winner of the equivalent there of the Booker Prize, and he is the recently elected President of PEN International. Notably, he was seriously injured after being assaulted by Turkish police in 1996, and received treatment in the UK, where he lived in exile for several years. He now lives and works in Istanbul and Ankara.

I read his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, published in English in 2016. The back cover of the book announces that “Istanbul is a city of a million cells, and every cell is an Istanbul unto itself”. The story focuses on four political prisoners in detention in a shared underground cell, where they are left to languish while waiting to be taken off for interrogation and torture. The prisoners come from different walks of life: Demirtay is a…

Introduction

True self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and false self (also known as fake self, idealised self, superficial self and pseudo self) are psychological concepts, originally introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by Donald Winnicott.

Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade, which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.

The concepts are often used in connection with narcissism.

Characteristics

Winnicott saw the true self as rooted from early infancy in the experience of being alive, including blood pumping and lungs breathing – what Winnicott called simply being. Out of this, the baby creates the experience of a sense of…

Here is a view of the London Television Centre, 60-72 Upper Ground, SE1. It is on the South Bank of the river Thames, a little to the East of the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall. It was completed in 1972 to the design of Elsom Pack & Roberts.¹

Appreciate this building while you can – it is bring demolished. Admire the variety of the sloping roofs, the unexpected angles, the terraces overlooking the river. Appreciate the unexpected finish: it is covered in tiny, white, glistening tiles.

The history of this and two other buildings due for demolition is documented in the excellent “London Inheritance” post: Three Future Demolitions. (May 16th 2021).

The planning application reference is “21/02668/EIAFUL” submitted to Lambeth Council on 5th July 2021. It says:

Demolition of all existing buildings and structures for…

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This is a bit of a throwback post, as some of it was first posted by me in 2019, and was in fact my fifth ever review on the blog. I’m re-posting with some additional discussion of publication prospects in the West for Turkish authors, as part of my month of Turkish cultural appreciation.

Translator from the Turkish Nicholas Glastonbury, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in May 2021, noted that “In various conversations with translators, agents, and colleagues, publishers often articulate that they have informal quotas for writers beyond Europe (e.g., ‘We already have a Turkish author’)”. Elif Shafak of course is “the” Turkish female writer read most widely in the UK and other Western nations, fairly or not.

Shafak is living effectively in exile from her homeland: by writing about controversial topics, such as the Armenian genocide, she…