Sunday, June 3, 2018

Madonna In a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali


    1943; 201 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Turkish Literature; Romance.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Never has Raif Efendi had his life touched this profoundly!  Maybe it's her enigmatic smile.  Perhaps it's her eyes, filled with anguish and resolve.  It might even be the fur coat she’s wearing.  Or her plump lips, her slightly swollen eyelids, her long nose, or even her slightly upturned chin.  Probably it’s a combination of all these features.

    Alas, 'tis a pity that this is a painting, not an actual person.  It’s hanging in an art gallery at an exhibition.

    But do not despair, Raif.  There must be some information listed in the exhibition catalog.  And sure enough there is.

    The painting is titled “Maria Puder, Self-portrait”.   So now you have a name, and possibly even a picture of your dream woman.  That’s a start.

    Unfortunately, you’re in Berlin, and you’re a poor Turkish immigrant, here to learn the soap-making trade.  You can barely find your way to the soap factory, and this is post-World War One Germany.  The Yellow Pages haven't been invented yet.

    But where there’s a will, there’s a way, Raif.  So maybe if you just go walking around the city, you’ll run into her.  Your Madonna In A Fur Coat.

What’s To Like...
    Madonna In A Fur Coat is a Turkish novel written in the 1940’s, set in Turkey in the 1930’s, with the main character, Raif, reminiscing about the time he spent in Berlin in the 1920’s.  The story is written in the first-person POV: by our never-named narrator for the first quarter of the book, then by Raif writing in his notebook for the rest of the way.

    The book is a masterful character study of the two protagonists.  Our narrator sees Raif as a mouse of a man, manipulated by the rest of his family, and stoically cowed at work .  He reminded me of Gregor Mamsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman.  But everything changes when he meets Maria, our other protagonist, who’s just as fascinating.  She's a strong female lead, and that may be commonplace nowadays, but not back in the 1940’s.

    The writing is impressive, given that this is an English translation from the original Turkish.  I liked the literary nods Sabahattin Ali gives to other prominent writers , both Turkish and worldwide: Turgenev, Theodor Storm, Jakob Wasserman, Michel Zevaco, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Ahmet Mithat Efendi, and Vecihi Bey.  There were also a couple of kewl art references.  I was introduced to Andrea del Sarto’s painting, Madonna of the Harpies, and was awed by it.

    This is a short book, barely 200 pages.  Wikipedia calls it a novella, but I think it’s too long for that designation.  Paradoxically, this was an easy read, despite the depth of the storyline.  I liked the post-WW1 “feel” of the settings, both in Turkey and in Germany.  These are countries that were on the losing side of that conflict, and their national psyches were impacted by that.  

    There’s not a lot of action in the book, which will turn off some readers.  Overall, this is a very sad tale, similar to classics like Flowers For Algernon and Doctor Zhivago, and that will turn off others.  It is also a Romance novel, which normally would cause me to run away from it.  Yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book.  It is an emotional rollercoaster ride, with incredible highs and lows, and with Fate dealing our two lovers some cruel twists.  Such is life at times.

Excerpts...
    He was rather ordinary, with no distinguishing features – no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a normal day.  Indeed, there was no part of his life – public or private – that might give rise to curiosity.  He was, in the end, the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves, “What does he live for?  What does he find in life?  What logic compels him to keep breathing?  What philosophy drives him as he wanders the earth?”  But we ask in vain if we fail to look beyond the surface – if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone.  (loc. 39)

    All my life, I’d shied away from human company, never sharing my thoughts with a soul.  How pointless this seemed now, and how absurd!  I’d thought that it was life itself that had ground me down, that my sadness stemmed from spiritual malaise.  After spending two hours with a book, and finding it more pleasurable than two years of real life, I’d remember again that life had no meaning and sink back into despair.
    But since first setting eyes on that painting, everything had changed.  (loc. 1271)

Kewlest New Word…
Pension n.; European) : a type of guest house or boarding house.
Others : Contretemps (n.).

Kindle Details...
    Madonna in a Fur Coat sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  Amazon doesn’t offer any other books by Sabahattin Ali in English, not even in paperback.  But if you’re fluent in Spanish or German, then there are several more options at Amazon.

“Even when he has a lamb between his teeth, a wolf can hide his savagery behind a smile.”  (loc. 1203)
    A few words should be said about Sabahattin Ali.  He was born in 1907, and died in 1948.  He was arrested in 1933 for writing a poem that was viewed as criticizing the policies of Turkey’s leader at the time, Kemal Ataturk, who's their equivalent of our George Washington.  He was jailed for several months, released, pardoned via amnesty, but required to write a nationalistic poem to prove his allegiance to Ataturk.

    He served in the Turkish military during World War 2, and was imprisoned and released once more in 1944.  He was subsequently denied a passport, and was murdered along the  Bulgarian border in 1948,  either by the smuggler he trusted, or the Turkish National Security Service.

    You might think this is just a product of Cold War mentality, but in 2005, the Turkish author (and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006) Orhan Pamuk was also persecuted by the Turkish government for expressing pro-Kurdish sentiments.  The specific charge was “insulting Turkisnness”.

    Apparently the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” is feared in Turkey.

   You can read the English-language Wikipedia article about Sabahattin Ali here.  There is a more complete Wkipedia article on him in Turkish, but unfortunately my knowledge of that language is limited to about two words.

    8½ Stars.  We’ll count this as my once-a-year highbrow read, even though it is probably more middlebrow (i.e.: “book club”) material.  It is also the fifth Turkish book I’ve read over the years, albeit only the second one since starting this blog.  The others are: Death In Troy, by Bilge Karasu; The Long White Cloud – Gallipoli, by Buket Uzuner; and two books by Orhan Pamuk, Snow and My Name Is Red.

No comments: