Discoveries

Young Turk

A Novel

Moris Farhi

Arcade: 392 pp., $25

Narghile smokers and teahouses; fiends and gods and deathsayers with seven eyes; swimming the Bosporus; sounds of the kanun, the magical 72-stringed instrument of Turkey; Bulgarian cigarettes; jinns and Gypsies. All these and more inhabit the imaginations of Moris Farhi’s 13 young friends in his novel “Young Turk.”

Mostly, it must be said, the boys are obsessed with sex. In one chapter, they are allowed access to paradise: the women’s hamam, or baths, in Ankara, where they study breasts and aureoles, rumps and clitorises until the gatekeepers decide they are too old and they are expelled.

Decaying Ottoman splendor in 1940s Ankara and Anatolia form the backdrop to this and many of the memorable scenes in “Young Turk.” Purple drapes, marble belly stones (the centerpiece of the hamam), kurnas, or marble tubs, and halvets (private chambers). My favorite character is Gul, a young girl who can see death coming: She sees her friend Rifat’s mother crushed in an earthquake; she sees war coming as Germany invades Poland. To her great relief, she is swallowed by the deathsayers at an early age.

There are summers on the Sea of Marmara, the “blue eyes of Attaturk,” the “luminosity of good soil.” The boys acquire Turkish names in the same year they learn to drink, sublimating their Jewish and Muslim identities and growing strange new political skins. Suddenly, courage is required: A young poet goes to prison, a thesis is confiscated, a Jew leaves Turkey to save himself, and a relationship ends.

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Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw

Travels in Search of Canada

Will Ferguson

Grove Press: 368 pp.,

$14.95 paper

Canada isn’t so much a country, writes native son Will Ferguson in “Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw,” as “a collection of outposts,” beyond which stretch enormous distances, fear and loneliness, a landscape that eats “souls whole.”

Ferguson grew up in Fort Vermilion, Alberta (population 840), a town divided into Mennonite, Cree, Metis and Ukrainian trapper neighborhoods. At 16, he departed (“no one ever moved away, they ‘left the fort’ ”) for the less-than-exotic city of Saskatoon (as in “marooned in Saskatoon”). Then, with his Japanese wife and 3-year-old son, he spends three years exploring Canada: moving west to east to “peel back the layers of history.”

Writing of these travels, he starts at a poetry slam at the James Bay Inn in Victoria, British Columbia, where the ghost of Emily Carr hovers over the yellowing pool hall; he samples the Finnish pancakes in Thunder Bay, Ontario; he watches polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba; and bathes in the calming waters of the Temple Gardens Mineral Spa in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (inexplicably derived from the Cree word for warm wind, moosgaw).

“Beauty Tips” is funny, but also fascinating, and above all a testament to the rich inspirational powers of the road trip.

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The Politics of Lust

John Ince

Prometheus Books: 336 pp.,

$16 paper

“The Politics of Lust” is one of those books that makes you question where your habits and beliefs really come from.

Ince writes that a hierarchical society (patriarchal, ethnic, religious) causes erotophobia, antisexualism and something he calls (terrifyingly) “rigidity,” a kind of rigor mortis of normal human sexual behavior caused by fear and often resulting in a simple lack of cleanliness. (His premise: If you can’t look at your own genitals, a syndrome Ince calls “fig-leafing,” you sure can’t keep ‘em clean.) Add to that a not-so-simple perversion of lust (tied, inexorably, to fear, guilt, shame and anxiety).

For this book, Ince examines the laws prohibiting oral and anal sex, nudity, adultery and group sex. He looks at sexual intolerance in sex education, in religious education and in the media. He all but says that the way we approach teen sex leads to disease, unwanted sex and emotional trauma. Let’s face it, we’re a mess. Ince doesn’t mince words.