Recently, I have been reading a famous Turkish book called Madonna in Fur coat written by Sabahattin Ali. The plot revolves around a shy young man from rural Turkey who moves to Berlin in the 1920s, where he meets a woman who will haunt him for the rest of his life.
When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943, it made no impression whatsoever. Decades later, when Madonna in a Fur Coat became the sort of book that passed from friend to friend, the literary establishment continued to ignore it. Even those who greatly admired the other works of Sabahattin Ali viewed this one as a puzzling aberration. It was just a love story, they said – the sort that schoolgirls fawned over. And yet, for the past three years, it has topped the bestseller lists in Turkey, outselling Orhan Pamuk. It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults. And no one seems able to explain quite why.
The story begins in 1930s Ankara, the Turkish Republic’s newly appointed capital. The narrator has fallen on hard times, and it is only with the help of a crass and belittling former classmate that he is able to find work as a clerk at firm trading in lumber. Here he meets the sickly, affectless Raif Bey, who is, we’re told, “the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves: “What do they live for? What do they find in life? What logic compels them to keep breathing?” When at last they make friends, it becomes clear that Raif’s reason for living cannot be his family. The relatives assembled under his roof treat him with the utmost contempt. And yet he welcomes their derision. Even on his deathbed, he seems to accept it as his due. But there is also a notebook, hidden in his desk drawer at work, which he asks his friend to destroy.
When his friend reads it instead, he meets a younger Raif, sent to Berlin by his father to study the manufacture of soap. Only a few years have passed since Turkey and Germany fought together on the losing side in the first world war, so he is warmly received by the pension’s other residents. But he is not much interested in the glad-eyed widows and the ruined colonialists, or for that matter, in soap. He devotes his days to reading and his evenings to strolling the streets. One evening, he wanders into an exhibition of contemporary art to be mesmerized by a portrait of a Madonna in a fur coat. He goes back the next evening, and the next, until finally the artist introduces herself. For the work that Raif has been admiring is a self-portrait. And though Maria Puder is the sort of free-thinking new woman he could never have imagined possible, the two form an intensely platonic friendship, in which Maria becomes more male than female, and Raif more female than male. It suits them both, but the world, as it closes in on them, has other plans.
The writer actually projected his own life experience in this novel. During his lifetime, and even after his death, Ali was publicly taunted for failing to act like a “real man”. There was endless innuendo about his time in Berlin. He never responded to it. Instead, he wrote Madonna in a Fur Coat, conjuring up a time and a place in which it was possible to be true to one’s nature, with air to breathe, and to live and love without pretense, if only for a brief period. It is not hard to see how a novel carrying those dreams but set far away, in a long lost Berlin, might promise a refuge, and some hope, to young readers in Turkey. They are only too aware that the space for free expression and even free thought is diminishing every day. But with this book in their hands, they can see that a story that is true to itself, and honest about love, can travel through walls. It has taken more than 70 years, says Genç, but at last Ali is having his revenge – not just in Turkish, but in English, too. May his fine book travel far.
Comments
This story is very touching and I can see how it is very popular among both younger generations who are struggling to find themselves and older generations who have given up on that dream a long time ago. I hope that Ali's message continues to be spread about an excepting world of one's true self. It is difficult to think we may someday be able to live in a society that lets people discover their own identity instead of having others force one upon them. However, with thinkers such as Ali, we might be able to make some sort of change.