Stephen Grosz's Love's Labour: What was love?

After a long break, this is actually the first book I have read outside my own academic field. I discovered it through an Instagram account I really enjoy following, @artindetaill, and decided to give it a try. In the past, I had read and written about psychoanalytic literary theory, but to be honest, this is the first time I have read a book written by a psychoanalyst.

When I write about a book, I usually care more about its content than its language. So when I picked up a non-fiction book written by a psychoanalyst, I naturally expected a heavy, academic style of writing. Grosz surprised me completely. His language is simple, smooth, and easy for anyone to understand. Maybe this is actually the real strength of the book: Grosz takes complex psychological ideas out of the heavy atmosphere of the therapy room and turns them into familiar stories, stories that feel close to our own everyday lives.

The book is built on real human stories taken from the author’s own clinical experience and life. As you read each case, you feel that Grosz has probably changed only the names, following the rules of patient confidentiality, while the psychological journeys themselves remain completely real.

The book is made up of independent chapters, and in each one, we witness a different, striking story. Yet behind all these different lives, the author always returns to the same central theme: Love.

Three stories in Grosz’s book affect us the most. The first is about Sophie, who can not bring herself to send out her wedding invitations just before her marriage. In therapy, we learn that Sophie is actually afraid building a new life will destroy the tightly bonded family she grew up in. In other words, she cannot let go of her past.

The second is Ravi, a man who develops impossible delusions that his wife is cheating on him. His unhealthy jealousy is not really about his wife at all. It is a shield, one that hides fear of abandonment from his childhood and protects him from real emotional closeness.

The third story is Kate, who crosses boundaries with both her uncle and her boss, and who eventually steals. From the outside, Kate looks simply guilty. But what she is truly searching for is not sexual pleasure. It is something much deeper: an “impossible mother’s love” that could finally fill the huge emptiness left by her mother’s rejection in childhood.

Generated by AI

To be honest, the part of the book that affected me the most, and the part I want to focus on here, is Sophie's story. It really shows that we do not have to live through someone else’s experience to understand it. What Grosz tells us through Sophie feels like a mirror of something almost all of us go through at some point in life: those unnamed hesitations, those quiet fears we can not fully explain, even to ourselves. 

Of course, I am not a psychoanalyst, so I cannot speak with the authority to explore the deep psychological layers of this story. As a reader, I simply want to focus on the impression it left on me and the lesson I personally took from it. Sophie’s story made me ask myself some powerful questions about marriage and love: Is love alone enough to get married? Is love something we need to work on, something that requires effort or is it supposed to grow naturally, on its own, between two people? And if love does require effort, is it still pure love, or does it slowly turn into something else? These are questions that, once you start thinking about them, are hard to let go of.

I want to end this blog with one of Stephen Grosz’s words: “When we cannot find a way to tell our own story, our story finds a way to tell itself to us by entering our dreams, turning into symptoms, or making us act in ways we cannot explain.”

The Pearl by Steinbeck: When Hope Becomes Destruction

John Steinbeck is often known for his short, simple, and powerful writing style. But for me, he is much more than a “quiet” author. Steinbeck does not hide behind fiction. Instead, he shows us the raw and uncomfortable truths of life, and while reading his words, we almost always find a piece of our own story somewhere between the lines. This is exactly what happens in The Pearl, just as it does in Of Mice and Men. After a long break from writing book reviews, it was this very quality, life itself, living inside literature, that brought me back to the keyboard.

We all have certain goals in life that we hold on to very tightly. We chase them because we believe they will save us that they will end all our problems and finally bring us the happiness we deserve. But life has a cruel irony: the shining things we sacrifice everything for, the goals we blindly trust to be “the best” for us, can sometimes become the very source of our destruction. They can be a quiet poison, slowly preparing our end. This is exactly what The Pearl forces us to face. As we turn its pages, we are actually tracing the false pearls and tragic mistakes in our own lives.

At the very beginning of the story, we witness the simple but peaceful life of Kino and his family. They wake up to the sound of the waves. They have very little, but they have love, trust, and a deep connection with nature. There is a quiet happiness in their world.

Then the pearl arrives…

At first, the pearl shines like pure hope in Kino’s hands. It feels like the answer to everything, an escape from poverty, a bright future for his baby Coyotito, a chance for a better life. But this does not last long. Very quickly, that shining surface begins to change. The pearl slowly turns into something darker: an obsession, a growing paranoia, a blind ambition that destroys the very things Kino is trying to protect.

This is one of Steinbeck’s most powerful lessons. The things we hold on to the most, the “pearls” we believe will save us, can quietly corrupt the purest and most human parts of who we are. We do not always notice it happening. And that is exactly what makes it so dangerous.

Generated by AI

While reading these pages, I am sure that your own “pearls” came to mind too. Those goals we chase desperately, believing they will rescue us from the life we have, the life we think is not enough, or even bad. We tell ourselves: when I get that pearl, everything will be different. All my problems will end. My life will finally become what it is supposed to be.

But sometimes we miss the most important truth: how do we know that the “wrong side” of our life is not actually better than the "right side"? As Rumi's companion Shams of Tabriz once suggested, what we call upside down may in fact be the truer way up. Kino falls into exactly this painful illusion. The moment the pearl lands in his hands, he sees the collapse of his poor but loving, peaceful life as a great liberation. The blind ambition that was supposed to save him takes over his soul so completely that he becomes an entirely different person. He destroys the very family he was dreaming of saving. The pearl is no longer a door to hope. It becomes a dark outline, one that quietly writes his own end.

Generated by AI

In the shocking final pages of the story, Kino and Juana return to the village. But they are no longer the same quiet, peaceful people they once were. They have paid the heaviest price for their ambition, for the destructive battle they fought trying to turn that pearl into something real. And so, they throw it back. The cursed pearl returns to the dark waters of the sea, to the same place where it all began.

The real tragedy, I believe, does not begin when we finally get the opportunity we have always dreamed of. It begins when we start trying to use it, when we try to turn that dream into something concrete, something profitable.

When Kino pulled the pearl from the sea, he had found only a possibility. But the moment he went to the town to sell it, to build a future from it, he crashed into the walls of a system built on greed, and into the walls of his own blind ambition.

Generated by AI

Is our own life really so different?

Getting into university, landing the job we always wanted, launching a project we believed in, these are simply the pearls we pull up from the bottom of the sea. But as we try to “cash in” on those pearls, we rarely notice how the competition, the stress, the changing faces around us, and our own hunger for success are slowly wearing us down. We run toward the goal. We grow tired. We change. And sometimes, like Kino, we lose the people and things we valued most along the way.

When we finally arrive, when the goal is reached, what remains in our hands? The wounds left by that exhausting journey, and one quiet question:

Was it really worth it?

Prophet Abraham by Muazzez İlmiye Çığ: Book Review

Prophet Abraham by Muazzez İlmiye Çığ: Book Review

I have just finished reading my first book of 2026, and I must say, it was a great start to the year. The book is “Prophet Abraham” by the late, expert Sumerologist Muazzez İlmiye Çığ. In this research work, she compiles existing knowledge and legends about Abraham, tracing their origins from ancient Sumerian tablets all the way to the holy books of today.

I had previously read her other seminal work, “The Sumerian Origins of the Quran, the Bible, and the Torah.” Although quite some time has passed since I read that one, I felt a strong pull to begin this new year with the wisdom of “Muazzez Hoca” to refresh my perspective on history.

Reading Çığ’s work is like being a detective in history. It forces you to look at familiar religious narratives through the lens of archaeology. In this blog, I want to share how the cuneiform scripts of the Sumerians might actually be the ancestors of the stories we know about Prophet Abraham today.

However, I must note that the book is not entirely objective. Rather than presenting a neutral historical account, Çığ interprets the archaeological findings through a very specific lens. She is fiercely dedicated to proving the Sumerian influence on monotheism, and at times, this passion overshadows a purely academic neutrality. Readers should approach it as a bold thesis rather than a definitive textbook.

While the book emphasizes Abraham's importance for every religion, the author herself struggles to remain impartial. I was expecting a detailed historical analysis rooted in research. Instead, I found the book heavily saturated with chapters and citations from the Torah (Old Testament) regarding Abraham and other prophets. Surprisingly, the narrative even carries strong "breezes" of Zecharia Sitchin leaning at times towards speculative alternative history rather than strict academic archaeology.

The Theological Disconnect: Monotheism vs. Polytheism

The book’s primary thesis rests on the idea that the holy books (The Torah, The Bible, and The Quran) are essentially derivations of Sumerian tablets. However, this leads to a significant logical contradiction regarding the timeline of faith.

In the Abrahamic tradition, the lineage of prophets starting from Adam and Noah represents a strictly monotheistic message. Historically, the Sumerians appear after these early figures but before the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Yet, the Sumerian culture was abruptly and vividly polytheistic.

If the holy books were simply "copy-pasted" from Sumerian texts as the author suggests, why do they vehemently reject polytheism?

It feels as though Çığ is attempting to sever the link between the ancient monotheistic tradition (Adam/Noah) and the later Abrahamic faiths by inserting Sumerian writings as the sole origin. To me, finding a similar story in a Sumerian tablet does not prove that a holy book is a fabrication. It simply shows that narratives, like people, travel across geographies and generations.

Conclusion

To sum up, "Prophet Abraham" by Muazzez İlmiye Çığ is a book that provokes thought, but it failed to alter my fundamental convictions.

While I respect the author’s vast knowledge of Sumerian cuneiform, her conclusion that the holy books are essentially Sumerian folklore felt like a forced theory rather than a natural historical progression.

The book attempts to bridge the gap between mythology and theology, but for me, the bridge collapsed under the weight of its own ideological bias. It did not convince me that monotheism is merely a rebranded polytheism. Read it to understand the richness of Sumerian culture, but take its theological claims with a grain of salt.