Madonna in a Fur Coat

A Novel

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Pub Date 07 Nov 2017 | Archive Date 06 Nov 2017

Description

Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.
 
A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics, and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.
 
Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric, and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings, the relentless pull of family ties, and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. First published in 1943, this novel, with its quiet yet insistent defiance of social norms, has been topping best-seller lists in Turkey since 2013.
Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.
 
A shy young man leaves his home in...

Advance Praise

“A poignant coming-of-age tale, drenched in disillusionment. The gap between hope and reality, art and ordinary life, has been explored in many other novels, but rarely with the unaffected simplicity of Madonna in a Fur Coat …The translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe is crisp, capturing Ali’s directness and clarity of language.” —William Armstrong, Times Literary Supplement

“Offsets inter-war Berlin’s decadent dazzle with bouts of shade, murk, and melancholy…recreates a vanished era and dramatizes a doomed relationship, and does so with verve, depth, and poignancy. The result is a miniature masterpiece.” —Malcolm Forbes, The National

“A gorgeously melancholic romance…a cautionary tale certain to beguile.” —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

“Its prose sparkles with the friction between Eastern conservatism and Western decadence. This is above all a tale of young love and disenchantment, of missed opportunities and passion’s elusive, flickering flame… a little reminiscent of Turgenev’s First Love, with a hero every bit as gauche, and a twist every bit as bitter.” —Toby Lichtig, Financial Times

“Exquisitely translated, perfectly captures the style and rhythm of this gripping love story.” —Selçuk Altun, internationally bestselling author of The Sultan of Byzantium

“A poignant coming-of-age tale, drenched in disillusionment. The gap between hope and reality, art and ordinary life, has been explored in many other novels, but rarely with the unaffected simplicity...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781590518809
PRICE $17.99 (USD)

Average rating from 12 members


Featured Reviews

A wonderful story of unfulfilled love and lost opportunities. This is a tale of a shy young man’s exhilarating experience of devoted love of a modern woman against the backdrop of social innovation and artistic ferment in Berlin between the two world wars. The rollercoaster of successes and failures in this romance are classic, as are the triumphs and tragedies. But this is no melodrama. It confronts the challenges to achieving the balance in the relationship between the sexes in a way that feels relevant to me today. That the main character is Turkish and the woman of hybrid German and Czech Jewish adds another dimension that enriched the read for me.

The narrator takes a job in a large business in Ankara where he tries to befriend his officemate, Rafe Efendi, a self-effacing man who quietly does his job as a German translator for commercial correspondence. Despite hearing that his translations are timely, accurate, and even elegant, he can’t understand why Rafe puts up with all the ridicule and mockery from his colleagues. When tasked with taking work to him at home when he is sick, the narrator learns that his wife, children, and in-laws who depend on his income abuse him and take him for granted. How can such a generous soul end up with such an attitude of defeat and acquiescent to being reviled? The narrator begins to see the hidden depths behind the man. In addition to a love of literature comparable to the narrator, Rafe retains a spiritual spark beneath the surface:
<i>Though he looked like an old man when viewed from the side, or from above, he looked enchantingly, and childishly, innocent when he smiled. </i>

Ali has the narrator lay down some key lessons of this tale near the beginning of trying to see Rafe’s hidden layers:
<i>When misfortune visits those who once walked alongside us, we do tend to feel relief, almost as if we believe we ourselves have been spared, and as we come to convince ourselves that they are suffering in our stead, we feel for these wretched creatures. We feel merciful.
…And there I was, trying so hard to penetrate someone else’s mind, to try to find out if the soul hiding inside it was ordered or in turmoil. For even the most wretched and simpleminded man could be a surprise, even a fool could have a soul whose torments were a constant source of amazement. Why are we so slow to see this, and why do we assume that it is the easiest thing in the world to know and judge another?</i>


When Rafe gets seriously ill, he entrusts a journal from his youth to his new friend, our narrator. His story begins when his academic ambitions in poetry are curtailed by a family mission to Berlin where he is tasked to learn the business of perfumed soaps as a strategy to expand their olive oil business. His rich romantic fantasy life inspired by literature clashes with his social awkwardness in talking or interacting with women. Even I can empathize with his ineptness:
<i>If I ever met a woman I found attractive, my first thought was to run away. From the moment we came face-to-face, I lived in dread that my every glance and movement might reveal my true feelings. Drowning in shame, I became the most miserable person on earth.</i>

He finds solace at the art museum, where he has become particularly obsessed with a painting called “Madonna in a Fur Coat”, which features a spiritual, elegant, and melancholy woman whose eyes he can stare into without compunctions. A woman in a group of artists passing by, Maria, boldly asks him about his devotion to the painting, a brief and liberating interaction that sparks a surprising enticement with her and the courage to pursue her further. When he encounters her again singing at a dancehall, he is surprised at the friendly eye contact:
<i>Without pretense, or moving her lips, she was greeting me like an old friend. She spoke only with her eyes, but she made her meaning clear.</i>

In fact, he is slow to recognize that the elegant woman in the painting, the outspoken intellectual artist, and the common dancehall performer are one in the same person. I loved how Rafe’s coming to us in layers is matched by layers he must parse in his love interest. I got some nice zings of wisdom out of the portrayal of love as involving both a selfless and selfish dimensions, such as this highlighting of how sudden love spurs us to reach far while at the same time exposing our yawning needs:

<i>A shaft of light had passed over me, illuminating my empty life with possibilities I dared not question.</i>

I won’t spoil anything more about the evolution of this relationship, but I will share some aspects of her Maria’s character and attitudes. For example, she has a chip on her shoulder over the arrogance and presumption of men with regard to women, especially their angry responses when their advances are rejected:
<i>…Why is it always we surrender and you take the spoils? Why is it that even in the way you beg, there is dominance, and pity in the way we refuse?

Rafe (and readers like me) has no problem empathizing with her modern outlook:
<i>Men and women have such a hard time understanding what we want from each other, and our emotions are so foggy that we hardly know what we are doing. We get lost in the current. I don’t want that. If I have to do things that seem to me to be unnecessary and unsatisfying, I end up hating myself …But what I hate most is women always having to be passive.</i>

However, two barriers stand in his way to getting closer to this alluring woman’s flame. On the one hand, she pegs him as almost a virtual woman she can feel safe to befriend. On the other hand, she sets quite a serious boundary for him:
<i>There’s one thing you must remember. This all ends the moment you want something from me. You can’t ask me for anything …Anything—do you hear!</i>

I felt I was witnessing the playing out of the idea that a great love can inspire one to become a better person. How the foundations of a self constructed from its ephemeral substance can sustain the tragic storms of life. I appreciated the narrator’s journey into hidden layers of Rafe, revealing such a noble bedrock built from love under the surface of what appears to all as a simple but broken spirit. With Maria, we get the layers of spiritual elegance portrayed in her self-portrait, the free-spirited intellectual and social artist, and the common and compromised dancehall singer. This story reminds me some of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” with its revelations of the hidden life of an office grind., and some of John Prine’s song, “Hello in There”, about the benefits of listening to the stories of the old and disabled. I feel an even more powerful link to Escher’s “Three Worlds”, which illustrates the strange coexistence of life on different planes:

<img src="http://totallyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/three-worlds.jpg" width="300" height="459"/>

Written during World War 2 while reflecting on the interwar period, this book likely embodies subtle critical dissection of Turkish society. But the author had to be careful as he ran into trouble over political content in his poetry and prose and experienced periods of imprisonment as a consequence. Having a portrayal of a Turkish man ready to embrace feminism while abroad in a European society is one way of highlighting cultural deficiencies at home. The affinity of the Ottomans for the German Empire during World War 1 was different from the largely neutral but anti-fascist course that Turkey took in World War 2. Sabahattin Ali writes from direct knowledge of German culture based on having studied there for two years in 1928 and subsequent work as a high school German teacher. “Madonna in a Fur Coat” was published to great acclaim in 1943. Tragically, he was killed at age 41 under mysterious circumstances at the Bulgarian border in 1948. We are lucky to have access to this first English translation. I agree with the sentiment that this is a hidden gem of world literature.

The book are provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

<img src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4b/44/8d/4b448dac7bb57b18a3c20e2316f96ec5.jpg" width="250" height="374"/>
<i>Sabahattin Ali, 1907-1948</I>

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First published in Turkey in 1943; published in translation in Great Britain in 2016; published by Other Press on November 7, 2017

The initial narrator of Madonna in a Fur Coat is newly employed in a Turkish firm when he meets Raif Efendi, who translates the firm’s documents from Turkish to German. Raif responds to hostility and derision with “unwavering serenity” and calculated isolation. His children and siblings show him little respect because his earnings are meager. Raif responds as if disdain is his due.

From his sickbed, Raif asks the narrator to destroy a notebook that Raif has been keeping since 1933. The narrator persuades Raif to allow him to read the notebook before chucking it into the stove. The theme of the tragic love story that Raif tells in the notebook has to do with the cruelness of fate, the burden we share of accepting the accidents of life that are thrust upon us.

Raif’s story takes him as a boy from a Turkish village to Berlin, where his father has sent him to learn how to make soap. He has little ambition but loves to read. Learning German opens a world of literature that had never been translated into Turkish. Visiting an art exhibition, he is taken by the modernistic self-portrait by Maria Puder of a woman in a fur coat.

Naturally, Raif’s notebook tells the story of meeting the artist and their odd friendship — odd because Maria hates men, hates their arrogant pride and entitlement, and conditions her friendship with Raif on never being asked for anything. But Maria senses an innocence in Raif. He seems like a little girl (a judgment that Raif’s father also bestowed, to Raif’s consternation), and is thus the kind of man she might befriend.

Raif, who has always “shied away from human company, never sharing my thoughts with a soul,” feels overwhelmed by his unspent passion for Maria. His conviction that life has no meaning is suddenly challenged by the meaning he finds in his chaste encounters with Maria as he experiences the thrill of finally being understood. Yet Maria believes that solitude is the essence of life, that “all unions are based on falsehood,” that we construct the partner or friend we want rather than seeing them in their reality, and then flee when the reality replaces the construct. For all their similarities, Raif and Maria have different opinions about love that place a barrier between them.

While the novel describes Raif’s evolving feelings, its focus is on Raif’s philosophy of life. Raif believes that no woman has ever loved him and none ever will because women are incapable of true love. “Instead, they ached for the unattainable — the opportunities missed, the salve that their broken hearts longed for — thereby mistaking their yearnings for love.” But Raif’s peceptions and beliefs change often, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. Change is Raif’s only constant despite his puzzlement with Maria, who makes a virtue of her inconsistency, telling Raif “that’s just the way I am … one day like this, another day like that.” At the same time, the story is about a man who understands the inevitably of change but is incapable of coping with it, a man whose will to believe in himself is irreparably broken.

As the novel moves to its conclusion, it becomes a story of tragic fate, and it is Raif’s reaction to his fate that defines the rest of his existence. Rather than spoiling the story by revealing its details (the resolution has elements of a soap opera), I’ll highlight some of Sabahattin Ali’s quotable prose:

“Nothing grieves me more than seeing someone who has given up on the world being forced to smile.”

“But isn’t this how souls come together, by holding another’s every idea to be true and making it their own?”

“How painful it is, after thinking that a woman has given us everything, to see that in truth she has given us nothing — to see that instead of having drawn her closer, she is farther away than ever!”

“The logic in our minds has always been at odds with the logic of life.”

“For a brief while, a woman had pulled me out of listless lethargy; she had taught me that I was a man, or rather, a human being; she had shown me that the world was not as absurd as I had previously thought and that I had the capacity for joy.”

Although set in Turkey and Berlin, the story has no boundaries. Its themes are relevant to any time or culture. I might not recommend the story for its plot, but its insight into human nature, its exceptional characterization, and its elegant prose make the novel a standout tragedy.

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