Night

1st edition/1st printing

Both a political novel of deep sophistication and a dazzling meditation on the craft and meaning of fiction, Night explores the redemptive powers of the imagination as it shows us the mind of a world-class novelist at work. Night begins as a writer’s notebook. It appears the narrative of a decent man, a writer of liberal sensibility who lives in a truly hellish place, where “nightworkers” prowl the streets, savagely murdering victims at random and leaving cryptic inscriptions about the advent of some apocalyptic “big night.”

It is a world of ritual mass-murder, of unrelenting paranoia and terror for its own sake, a world rife with rumor and deception. The writer tells of being blackmailed through a supremely cynical political maneuver into attending a foreign conference as a showpiece delegate. The journey he relates begins in deceit and ends in disaster. Set alongside the writer’s story is the story of the creation of the book itself. In asides and footnotes, the writer decides on one narrative strategy, second-guesses it, then tries another, as he works his way toward an ending he cannot quite imagine. The author presents the book-in-progress through the voices of four curiously complementary characters: the writer; his nemesis, a onetime school companion who has become an administrator in both the government and a paragovernmental organization; and two agents under the administrator’s direction, a man named Sevinc and a woman named Sevim. Sevinc and the original narrator become lovers who keep being reunited, and Sevim, another former schoolmate and for a time the administrator’s wife, finds herself in a struggle between strategy and conscience that ends in her murder. Ultimately the identities of the voices in Night fracture and blend, the footnotes seem to take on a life of their own, and the parallel narratives fuse in a nightmarish climax that is utterly unforgettable. Night is political in the most profound sense, in its exploration of the human condition and our own culpability in oppression, whenever and wherever it occurs.

Spare and shocking, by turns lyrical and grotesque, this metafictional anatomy of the modern soul invites comparison with Orwell’s 1984, Kafka’s The Trial, and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.