Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat)

Careful: this gives away how the book ends.

The book begins with a faded man.

Raif Efendi is a German translator at a company. He talks to nobody, nobody takes him seriously, even at home he seems superfluous. He lives in a crowded house: his wife, daughters, son-in-law, brother-in-law. All of them live on his money and none of them respects him.

The narrator, after losing his job, joins that company and shares Raif's desk.

Together with the narrator I too brushed him off in the first fifty pages. Then the notebook opens.

Inside the notebook

Raif falls ill and gives the narrator a notebook, asking him to burn it. The narrator reads it.

Berlin in the 1920s. Raif is young. His father has sent him to learn soap manufacturing, but he spends his days in museums and bookshops.

At an exhibition he comes upon a painting: a self-portrait of a woman in a fur coat. For months he goes every day and sits in front of that painting.

Then he meets the painter: Maria Puder.

Maria

She became the character I did not expect.

In a novel written in 1943, a woman who builds her own life, refuses to marry, says plainly what she wants. She has painted her own picture, earns money singing in a nightclub, and needs nobody to rescue her.

The demand for equality in the relationship is also hers. She says it plainly to Raif: do not turn me into something, do not try to save me, do not expect a role from me.

She tells him she is tired of men, that all of them want something from her. That is why she finds Raif different: he wants nothing.

At one point she tells him "you are more like a child than a man," and this is a compliment.

The only thing Raif does

Accepting this demand.

He does not try to turn her into something. He does not place her inside a story. He does not claim her.

After reading Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) I paid more attention to this. There a man collects the woman he loves: he stockpiles her belongings, watches her life, turns her into a museum. Here a man leaves the woman he loves as she is.

Reading the two books back to back was unexpectedly instructive, and both ask the same question: where do loving and possessing part ways?

What caught me

Not the Berlin chapters, actually. The structure.

What a person carries being entirely invisible from outside.

Nobody knows who the quiet clerk sitting in the room is. Nobody asks. And he does not tell.

He does not tell, because telling requires explaining and explaining is tiring. After a point you agree to be described as "that's all there is," because objecting feels more expensive.

I do not know if there is anyone who does not know this. I know it all too well.

Separation and after

Raif has to return to Turkey on his father's death. He tells Maria he will come back.

He writes, gets no answer. Waits for months. Then gives up, marries, becomes a clerk, goes quiet.

Years later Maria's relative turns up: Maria was pregnant, she had written a letter but it did not arrive, she died in childbirth. There is a daughter and that daughter is alive.

Raif learns this. He sees his daughter.

And he does nothing.

The notebook ends there and at that point I could not close the book for a while. A missed life being noticed as missed, and by the very person who missed it. And even after noticing, his being unable to move.

Sabahattin Ali

Five years after writing the book, in 1948, he was killed while trying to flee abroad. He was thirty-nine.

I do not know if reading it with this knowledge changes the book. It changed it for me.

What kind of reading

Two hundred pages and the language does not strain you at all. One of the easiest-reading books on this list; it finishes in a day.

Emotionally, though, it is one of the most loading. That it reads easily does not mean it is light.

The first fifty pages are slow and that slowness is deliberate: they want you to find Raif boring so that when the notebook opens you feel the same shame as the narrator.