“Strings are playing behind me. Like when someone walks proudly in a movie or TV series. Strings that I know always play sad things - they sound completely different when I'm smiling. Am I smiling because they don't play sad things in the end - or is it because they don't play sad things because I can smile? In his first book, Strings Play in the Background, Melikşah Altuntaş brings together stories about mourning losses, relationships that are stuck, mothers and children communicating through diaries, and troubled fathers and sons. The stories, which sometimes flirt with autofiction, lead towards the desire to survive hidden in all the darkness of life. All deaths, abandonments and losses are accompanied by ordinary photographs that want to keep time tightly. As the pages flow by under our hands, Altuntaş points to the strings playing softly behind the sad farewells.
EN − EUR
