Cold Nights of Childhood
Notes, Quotes, and Reflections
Welcome to Notes, Quotes, and Reflections, aka a look inside my reading journal. This week I’m logging Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Ozlu.
Title: Cold Nights of Childhood
Author: Tezer Özlü
Translator: Maureen Freely
Translation Published: Transit Books, 2023
Originally Published: 1980
Read Date: January 1-3, 2025
First of all, I love everything Transit Books publishes. They’re a very small non-profit publisher here in the U.S. that publishes a mix of translated literature and creative non-fiction. If you don’t know about them, now you know! Go buy their books.
They published a translation of Tezer Ozlu’s Cold Nights of Childhood in 2023 (they’re publishing another one of her books soon), and it has been lingering on my TBR ever since. I’m a big mood reader, so I genuinely believe in divine timing when it comes to reading.
I picked this up as my first book of 2025. We had heavy snow, and I spent a solid week inside, indulging in reading and journaling. I read this short little novel in just a couple of days, and I do believe it was perfect timing. Despite some of the subject matter, there is an overwhelming sense of life’s beauty peeking through these pages. It kicked off a pretty good reading year (thus far) and I’m excited to share my notes with you.
“There is no place, no life more beautiful than this one. Life’s beauties are not somewhere else. They are here, all around us.”
Reading Notes
repeated mentions of “cold” or lack of warmth
staccato sentences
her childhood years are set in the 1950s—a rapidly-changing culture in Turkey with increasing Western influence and modernization.
her young adult years occur in the 60s, a politically chaotic period in Turkey, bookended by the coup d’etat of 1960 and the 1971 memorandum.
March 12 revolution is referenced towards the end, so that gives context for the time period
She reminisces on the confused (free, unadulterated) eroticism of childhood, the way her sister and cousins used each other as kindling amidst a cold, regressive, stifling world. This gave her a sense of freedom about her body that she wanted to share.
I don’t know if they refer to it specifically but it sounds like she has bipolar disorder.
she receives electroshock treatments while she is in and out of the hospitals. her description of the treatments are painful.
Resentful of the strict social structure that suppresses her desire, her autonomy, her search for warmth and love. That renders her most natural experiences of life (the joy and the despair) as an illness deserving of oppressive treatments.
A nod to the civil unrest in the city around her, there is a revolutionary spirit in the narrator’s unabated indulgence in love, warmth, and bodily union.
semi-autobiographical novel and the author’s first
Ozlu died of breast cancer at 43 (it seems every great female writer dies of cancer at 43—I’m thinking of Janet Hobhouse, though maybe she wasn’t exactly 43)
As she leaves the cold nights of childhood behind, she seeks to fulfill her innate loneliness through the whims of her madness.
Now that I’ve read The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas, who wrote the intro to this edition, I can absolutely see the influence Ozlu had on her.
Further Reflection
This book is about the beauty of life and the magnetism of death, the way these two desires exist alongside each other, neither meaningful without the other.
Reminiscing on the past, our narrator is resentful of the limiting social structures that suppress her natural desire and autonomy. Between the militaristic household of her childhood; the patriarchal system that left women in loveless marriages, servants to the men of their families; the oppressive regimes that demanded patriotic fervor; the strict nuns of the Western lycee; and the encroaching influence of western modernity; she felt constricted by the hypocritical rules of life set out for her.
As she leaves the cold nights of childhood behind, she seeks fulfillment in the cafes and clubs of the city, in relationships, in sex. Her experience of life (extreme joy and despair) is rendered as an illness deserving of abusive electroshock treatments and confinement. These harrowing experiences color the rest of her days.
There is no cohesion in time or place here, leaving the reader caught in the same vacuum of madness as the narrator. But still, there is a revolutionary spirit in the narrator’s unabated indulgence in love, warmth, and bodily union.
Quotes
“All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie” (85)
“The moment I begin to act just a bit like myself, I’m carted off to be locked once again behind bars.” (83)
“No one mentions that life is none other than the days, nights, and seasons through which we pass. We sit there waiting for the sign. Preparing. For what?” (42)
“I want to write. But I keep getting pulled into the world outside. I want to wander down these streets and avenues, drinking in everything I see, making new discoveries, watching these people who remain strangers to me, all around me, this unquenchable life that I so long to take into my heart.” (p. 57)
“Life is full of passion. This we know. The more you come to love life, the more your recognition of death grows and evolves. The beauties of life win. If I can bid farewell to this love with such ease, then I can do the same, just as beautifully, to life. I can embrace love and at the same time let it flow away, like the gentle breeze, like the Aegean.” (p. 99)
Book Recommendations
The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas
Voice Over by Celine Curiol
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimopulos
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Love the way the behind-the-scenes your note-taking comes through this glimpse, it gives off the feeling of flipping through a used copy's annotations and marginalia! And your thoughts are still so coherent and interesting, even as someone who hasn't read Cold Nights of Childhood (yet)--big fan of this series!