| During the
1960s and 70s, Turkish-born Erje Ayden served as house
pulp fiction writer to the New York School of painters
and poets. Friend and sometime bodyguard to the artist
Willem De Kooning, Ayden self-published 7 pop novels, written
in rapid amphetamine bursts in borrowed apartments and
rooming houses. Sadness at Leaving , re-published
by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is Ayden's most autobiographical
work-if one accepts, as he claims, that he worked as a
spy for the Turkish government throughout those years.
East Berlin, 1959: Following the erection
of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned
by East German intelligence to move to New York where he'll "sleep" as
a writer until he is called. Using the code-name "April 23," Carl
successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world
in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks,
and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock
novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden's hilarious Norman Mailer
pastiche. Through Carl's eyes, we see New York City change
from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic,
post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects
it, he's called. |
