The Desperate Road

The American Road is not the only one on which yearning, despair and the nurtured hopes of personal reinvention travel. Here, a a Turkish truck driver, back home after difficult years in Germany, hits the asphalt, first with and then in search of his estranged former love, herself on the run from gangsters keen to visit harm on her pimp husband. Moving from teeming Istanbul (its neon appeal well caught) across the burnished gold of the Anatolian plateau to the southeast and the Syrian desert, this open-ended fable of low life aspiration, betrayal and solidarity has a pulp melancholy that engages fast, despite occasional unevenness in narrative and characterisation. Its primary concerns, however, lie with the double-edged lure of an unrecoverable past and with the loneliness of urban lives made nomadic, both emotionally and geographically, by the pressures of economic survival and the dislocations of modernity.