User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I finished this book a few days ago....( haven’t read any reviews yet)....and it’s unusual for me to wait 3 days before writing a review.
Have you ever felt you have so much to say - you don’t know whet to begin?
Ha...perhaps there’s a club for people like us?
It’s a fantastic discussion book!!!
Well, I’m on vacation - aware of holiday-distractions - but this is a book I’d personally love to engage with others to discuss.
Perhaps if I bang my head against the wall - the right words at the right time would flow out of me....ha.... not so sure. But this is a TERRIFIC NOVEL with VERY CREATIVE writing. Great styling. .... it has me still thinking about it!!!
For starters - Elif Shafak - the Turkish novelist - who lives in London today - an advocate of women’s equality and freedom - is becoming one of my favorite female novelist.
A few months ago I read that the Turkish government launched investigations into writers of fiction- including Elif Shafak for writing about sexual violence in turkey.... threatening free speech.
So? I can’t help but wonder what the Turkish government thinks of this book. Is this book controversial- too?
I think perhaps so.
But... it’s a significant novel - filled with facts and fiction — vibrantly imagined.... and keeps the reader just a little off balance until the end. At which point .... I just said ‘Wow’ to myself.
We take a journey with a dying prostitute- Tequila Leila - ( a murdered - narrator who is lying in a rubbish bin)... who had lived on the streets in Istanbul where they harbored the oldest licensed brothels.
Throughout the novel are reoccurring themes about women’s right and political stiflings.
The crafting of storytelling is very unique.
“Two minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila’s mind recalled two contrasting tastes: lemon and sugar”.
Leila saw herself as a six-year old child- an only child... lonely, restless, Always a little distracted. Her biological mother- Binnaz,- was one of nine siblings..... grew up in a poor village- and was often reminded by her husband, Haroun, that she came from nothing. All the women were made to feel like nothing from Haroun.
Leila had a complicated childhood and family....with two mothers...( as if that wasn’t complicated enough), her father - Haroun/ Baba felt the responsibilities of marriage, sex, and fatherhood was all too complicated. He wanted to just be done with it all.....especially after a younger brother, Tarkan, was born with Down syndrome. Leila was 7 years of age when Tarkan was born. Baba, disappointed and angry to have a son with Down syndrome, he took his frustrations out on Leila.
Leila grows up - leaves home - bolts from home - hoping Istanbul will fulfill her dreams of a better life.
But.... it wasn’t...
The brutal realities & cruelties reveal themselves through the background and help from five of Leila’s close friends. The five friends have their background stories too.
“Three minutes had passed since Leila’s heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee. A taste for ever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul”.
“Four minutes after her heart had stopped beating, a fleeting memory surfaced in Leila’s mind, bringing with it I smell and taste of watermelon”.
“Five minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila we called her brothers birth. A memory that carries with it the taste and smell of spiced goat stew - cumin, fennel, seeds, cloves, onions, tomatoes, tail fat, and goat’s meat”.
“Six minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila pulled from her archive the smell of a wood burning stove.
“Seven minutes ....
As Leila’s brain fought on, she remembered the taste of soil-dry chalky, bitter”.
“Eight minutes had gone by, and the next memory that Leila pulled from her archive was the smell of sulphuric acid”.
“Nine minutes...
The taste of chocolate bonbons with surprise fillings inside — caramel, cherry paste, hazelnut praline...”.
“Ten minutes....
As time ticked away, Leila’s mind happily we collected the taste of her favorite street food: deep fried mussels- flour, egg yolks, bicarbonate of soda, pepper, salt, and mussels fresh from the Black Sea”.
“Ten minutes Twenty Seconds....
In the final seconds before her brain completely shut down, Leila remembered a wedding cake-thee tired, all white, layered with buttercream icing”.
“Ten minutes and Thirty Seconds...
In the final seconds before her brain surrendered, Tequila Leila recalled The taste of a single malt whiskey. It was the last thing that had passed her lips and the night she died”.
The final scene is powerful .....
Elif Shafak is a phenomenal storyteller.
This isn’t a book one forgets!
I had one small problem - which I’m sure will get corrected. My early copy of the ebook had many Kindle-typing mis-spelled words - several were hard to figure out what they were.
However... this novel is pulsing with thought & life .....narrated by an extraordinary dying protagonist.
Thank You Netgalley, Bloomsbury Publishing, and the wonderful Elif Shafak
Rating: really liked it
"To the women of Istanbul, and the city of Istanbul, which is, and has always been, a she-city"I love that this is Elif Shafak's dedication for her book. It is oh-so-apt.
Many, many reviewers have spoken of the significance of the book's title both in depth & eloquently. So I'll not re-visit its' significance.
What I will say is reading this was extremely emotive. A squeeze to the heart.
This is Leila's story. And one that you should read. She recounts memories of her life, from her birth, to a young child, to an adult, to her final breath. Many of them long forgotten. Many of them best forgotten.
My heart cried out for the injustices suffered by her and so many women, both in the past as well as the present. Undoubtedly in the future too. Though I'm upset not only for the women, but for
all people who are abused, displaced, judged, held back, hurting, ignored... the list is endless. All because they do not fit into the confined parameters of a patriarchal society. Or one marred by religious zealotry.
This story brings into sharp focus all these people and their stories. In a wondrous blend of the modern, changing world versus traditional, sometimes superstitious practices.
The underlying beauty in this book is friendship, a theme which comes across bold & strong. As I've read so many times in the past week (synchronicity?)
"family you are born with, friends are family you choose". Or something along those lines. Which crossed my mind repeatedly while reading Leila's story. For her, this is so true.
We hear the backstories of Leila's dearest friends, each of them
"...one of the five." who become her new family in
".... Istanbul, the city where all the discontented and all the dreamers eventually ended up."Hollywood Humeyra, Jameelah, Nostalgia Nalan, Sabotage Sinan & Zaynab122 display an intense loyalty to Leila which is a joy to behold. What they do for her after her death is both fierce & brave.
"Leila did not think one could expect to have more than five friends. Just one was a stroke of luck.""She had often thought five was a special number.""If friendship meant rituals, they had them by the truckload."" 'You are not family.'
'We were closer to her than family...' ""Leila had friends. Lifelong, loyal, loving friends. She might not have had much else, but this she surely had."I cannot even begin to express how reading about the "Cemetery of the Companionless" made me feel.
Sensual writing abounds. You can smell the scents of spices, cardamom, lemon. You can feel the heat from the sky. The evening breeze on your neck. The lights of the city at night. The sizzle of the food vendor's grill. See the sun reflecting off the harbour. Hear the seagulls careening. The writing is so wonderfully descriptive. It was like I could step into the pages and be there.
Don't think from my review that this is a depressing story. Far from it. I know it could be viewed that way. Yes, there is incredible sadness. But there is also hope. And friendship. And love. For me this book re-affirms how very special life it. What it means to be alive. How we can try to make changes and make the world more inclusive. And most importantly to (hopefully) be able to share your life with those who are special and mean something to you.
The ending, oh the ending!
"Free at last."An absolute wonder from Elif Shafak. 5✩✩✩✩✩ plus.
*** This was an unofficial buddy read (*waves*) with the extremely well- read-book-fiend Collin. He is a Man Booker Prize 2019 long-list-reading machine. #TeamCollin. Please check out his utterly fab review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ***
Long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2019 *** Shortlisted for the Man Booker. SO pleased! *** "After all, boundaries of the mind mean nothing for women who continue to sing songs of freedom under the moonlight..."Amen to that Sister 🌜
⭐⭐⭐ Extra stars for there being a cat by the name of Mr Chaplin. A coal black, jade eyed, deaf sweetheart. Whose cat mother Leila rescued. Yet another being that she took under her wing.
Rating: really liked it
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is all that remains in the life of Tequila Leila, a sex worker who has been murdered, her body unceremoniously dumped in a wheelie bin in Istanbul.
As her brain shuts down, Leila recalls her life in its entirety. These recollections – covering one woman’s life from birth to death, the family who disowned her and the friends who came to be her greatest support, against a backdrop of key moments in Turkish history – form
Part One: The Mind.
In
Part Two: The Body, those friends try desperately to obtain a decent burial for Leila, whose corpse the authorities refuse to release to anyone who is not a relation.
And right there, in that two-part structure is something startlingly radical: Leila is both a mind AND a body, a fully rounded woman with four decades of lived experience AND a cadaver on a medical examiner’s table. Her death is not where the story ends or (chronologically) where it begins. Her grisly murder is not an outrage to be avenged, nor a puzzle to be solved – there is no brilliant/jaded/antisocial detective – it is simply a tragedy. A lurid death of the type so common in fiction (and upon which a whole genre has been built) – a murdered whore stuffed into a bin – but here the victim is humanised, centred, she is no plot device in someone else’s story.
It might not sound like a big deal, but I tell you at the start of Part Two I had a physical reaction to seeing Leila, the woman who I had just got to know so well, lying on an ME’s table, no longer Leila, just ‘the body’. And yet SO many stories, in fiction and in film, start there. With a victim who is just a body, just a plot device.
This is not a perfect novel by any stretch. Leila’s life story is compelling, but not remarkably so; Shafak’s prose style is lush and sensual, but also sentimental. Two consecutive chapters open with almost identical lines, which felt slightly lazy. Leila’s ‘found family’ of misfits are drawn with broad brushstrokes and feel more like ‘types’ than real people and their farcical efforts in Part Two are a bit slapsticky (Part Two is overall weaker than Part One).
But along with the mawkishness and melodrama there is charm and wisdom and beauty and compassion.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a novel that beguiles and seduces despite its flaws.
Rating: really liked it
If you read the synopsis of the plot, you may think it sounds strange and rather unappealing ... While reading the novel, you will feel emotionally exhausted and at the same time you will recall what friendship means, the friendship Leila was continually offered even after her brain shut down completely and her soul left her body.
Leyla, her group of friends and Istanbul and the main protagonists, and the worlds are of different nature, the individualism versus the strict rules imposed by the society. Diversity versus uniformity.
The narration takes us gradually through Leyla's life, which was sad right from the beginning, but later on she found continual support and love, and respect when she no longer was with her closest friends, who actually became her family.
Leyla's story will stay with me for a long time, and as a reader, I would like to say 'Than you' to Ms Shafak. This was my first book by her, but not the last one.
Rating: really liked it
Even before I read this novel, I was surprised to see it on the Man Booker longlist based solely on my experience reading Shafak's -
The Three Daughters of Eve, which I enjoyed, but found imperfect.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has a good title and a somewhat original premise - as it's told, in the first part anyway, from the perspective of Leila, a prostitute, who's dead or dying, so she's got 10 minutes and 38 seconds before her brain has no activity. The author uses this device for flashbacks, starting with Leila's mum's life as a second wife, Leila's arrival into this world, her growing up, up to her death.
Leila's upbringing was unorthodox, as her Muslim father has two wives. Her biological mother became her aunty, while the father's baren first wife is Leila's mother.
At sixteen, the impulsive Leila leaves for Istanbul to escape an arranged marriage. Inocent and unprepared, she's sold into prostitution, ending up working in one of the government-sanctioned brothels of the 1960s.
She acquires five good friends, all people who didn't belong due to skin colour, gender identity, origins or physical disability. We briefly get to know each and everyone's story. Women on the verge, women who suffer, women who are just trying to survive. But, if I'm being honest, it felt tokenistic (is that a word?).
Crazy, messy Istanbul features greatly in this story. A couple of important events, such as the 1968 anti-US fleet protests and the May 1977 Taksim Square Massacre, events that affect Leila's life trajectory.
This is another novel I feel I should have liked more, much more, even without the added pressure of it being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. There are things I admired about it.
Overall, I found it uneven, occasionally clunky. The ending was completely over-the-top, veering into melodrama. All these things and more kept me from feeling much for the characters. If you can't win me over when I'm already a convert, I blame it on you, the writer in this case.
This novel is not greater than the sum of its parts.
After finishing this, I'm even more puzzled by the Man Booker judges' decision to shortlist this novel, even without reading any other books on the longlist or shortlist.
Rating: really liked it
Pleased to see this made the Booker Prize 2019 longlist!
Elif Shafak is a bestselling novelist known for her stories of strong female characters, immigrants and minorities. She follows this trend in her latest novel '10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World' depicting a story of Leila. Leila, known as Tequila Leila, is a prostitute in Istanbul who is killed at the start of the book and her body ends up in a rubbish dump. After being physically dead, Leila's brain remains active for another 10 minutes and 38 seconds, during which Leila's memories surge forth bringing back significant moments of her life and more importantly, stories of her 5 close friends she met at key stages in her life. Leila's first memory is dedicated to her own birth in 1947, when she was born to a family of one husband and two wives. After years of being childless, the father of the family decides to give Leila to his first wife, even though it's the second wife who gave birth to Leila. Leila's birthmother never truly recovers from the loss of her baby and reveals the truth to Leila some years later. While loved by her family, Leila's upbringing is strict with little freedom. Desperate to escape the life and marriage that was arranged for her, Leila runs away to Istanbul to start a new life.
I enjoy reading books set in Turkey and Middle East drawing on the local culture and traditions so different from my own. This book was no exeption. It's beautifully written with a vivid depiction of Istanbul and some of the historical events such as the massacre in Istanbul on International Workers' Day in 1977. Whilst I enjoyed Leila's story, I did feel there could have been a bit more to it. Leila's five friends were a unique and interesting bunch of characters with their own lifestories to tell and I wished we knew more about them.
Many thanks to Penguin Books (UK) for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 This riveting tale has two protagonists: The women of Turkey and the city of Istanbul. Right at the beginning, we meet Leila, a prostitute who was attacked and then left to die in a metal rubbish bin on the outskirts of the city. The title-giving 10 minutes and 38 seconds are the time span in which her brain slowly shuts down, one last time re-collecting her life in numerous flashbacks - these vignettes make up the first half of the novel (and in the context of the Booker are reminiscient of Mike McCormack's Solar Bones from 2017). Leila's memories are connected to the people she cherished most: D/Ali, an artist, communist activist and the love of her life, and her five best friends: Sinan, with whom she grew up; Nalan, a trans woman who ran away from her family in Anatolia; Jameelah, a victim of human trafficking from Somalia; Zaynab, a Lebanese refugee with severe health issues; and Humeyra who was born in Mesopotamia and fled an abusive marriage. Leila herself left the city of Van, where she was born in 1947, running away from sexual abuse and the threat of a forced marriage.
All of these characters end up in Istanbul, and their stories are entangled with Turkish history and the history of the city. Istanbul, melting pot and moloch, the
"liquid city" where
"everything was constantly shifting and dissolving", a city haunted by the past:
"In Istanbul it was the living who were the temporary occupants, the unbidden guests, here today and gone tomorrow, and deep down everyone knew it." Shafak's novel touches upon topics like violence against women and minorites, patriarchal structures, religious indoctrination and oppression (but also religion as a source of strength), discrimination against queer and trans people, migration, social inequality, corruption, police brutality, and political turmoil like the violent protests against the Sixth Fleet in 1969 and the massacre on International Workers' Day in 1977. It is equally true that in 1990, when Leila is murdered, there was an increasing number of crimes against sex workers in Istanbul.
But this is also book about friendship and solidarity between people who are very different. In the second part of the novel, the five friends try to give Leila, who was not claimed by her family and thus brought to the Cemetery of the Companionless (a real place), a proper burial in order to honor their friend and to say good-bye: Leila might not have been what society expected of her, but she was loved. The short, final section, describes this unusual burial from the perspective of the corpse, and you will be surprised how beautiful it is.
At one point in the book, Leila describes her own memory as a graveyard, and it is astounding how Shafak manages to merge and mirror her human characters with the character that is Istanbul, the city of the dead,
"a city prophesied to remain unconquered until the end of the world. For in the distance, the Bosphorus whirled, mixing saltwater with freshwater as easily as it mixed reality and dream." A beautiful, moving book, that manages to talk about a specific subject, but also the human condition as such:
"Istanbul was an illusion. (...) In truth, there was no Istanbul."
Rating: really liked it
LONGLISTED (and hopefully shortlisted) FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE.
Leila knows she is dead. Not from the fact that her body is lying in a waste bin, but from the facts that her heart is no longer beating, and her breathing has stopped. Her brain however is still, “brimming with life”.
In life Leila had been a prostitute. Tequila Leila was the name she had given herself. She was well known to the authorities and knew that they would have no trouble identifying her body once the sun came up and it was discovered.
Leila has no idea how long her brain will continue to function before it follows the rest of her organs and dies. However, it seems that as Leila comes closer to losing actual conciseness, her brain’s activity is heightened and memories of her life and past suddenly start streaming in. A minute in this state of mind can seem to last a lifetime and Leila finds herself remembering the smell, the feel of objects that lead her to vital memories from her life. Most of these memories are of her small number of closest friends. The old cliché that your life flashes before your eyes as you die seems to be true.
This novel is divided into three parts. With the first part, each chapter is a minute of memories, or a memory of one of Leila’s friends. The perspective changes constantly throughout these chapters switching to help the narrative. Through these memories the reader can start to construct Leila’s life, and how she has come to this ignominious end. During this reconstruction, you start to wonder do instants or circumstances in a life alter that life’s path or send it off on a different tangent, or is everything preordained, unchangeable, regardless the events that the life encounters. Would Leila’s life have been different if her father had not been so fanatically religious, closing off, denying Leila freedoms that most of us take for granted. Is it her father’s intolerance for the western world and religion that moulded Leila into the woman she became? What chance did Leila have as a young girl locked into and inescapable draconian way of life? Sexually abused by her Uncle, forced to marry the Uncle’s son. Leila has one option to escape this slowly closing trap. She runs away, leaving the family behind.
The second part of the novel is devoted to Leila’s five grieving friends who are determined to remove Leila’s body from the Cemetery of the Companionless. A Cemetery for the unwanted, the unknown, the unloved. A cemetery where there are no headstones just a piece of wood or tin with a number.
Leila’s friends know the difficulty and risks of digging up their friends body and yet they all proceed with the plan, displaying the power and love of true friendship and how powerful a force it can be, often stronger than blood.
Shafak turns this part of the novel, paradoxically, considering the situation and location, into a comedic charade, which is hilarious as the five friends argue and fight with each other while trying to find Leila’s gravesite.
The third part of the book, well, you will have to read it and find out.
I must say that I adore the metaphorical writing style that Shafak has used. This novel is a beautiful read,
“Burdened with these suspicions, she moved around the house, around her bedroom, around her own head, like an uninvited guest.”
“Unspoken words ran between the women of this town, like washing lines strung between houses.”Or my favourite,
“Restless and bouncy, and always a little bit distracted, she reeled through the days, a chess piece that had rolled on to the floor, consigned to building complex games for one.”I feel I would have loved this novel, even if the narrative had been terrible, boring or ridiculous. The strength of the writing is tremendous. This novel does an incredible job pointing out the polar differences between the life of a young girl brought up in the east, under a religious zealot of a father, filling her young impressionable mind with dogma, and a young girl living in the west, growing up with opportunities that Leila could not even dream of, would not even be aware of their existence. For a young woman, this way of life is incredibly unfair and unjust. Sometimes fiction can teach us just as much as non-fiction, sometimes more.
This is an incredible novel. The whole idea of the protagonist being dead at the beginning of the book and reliving their life through the memories of a slowly dying brain is just so original and works to such great effect. This novel also shines a light on the terrible, violent lives of the women trapped in horrible conditions that in a modern connected world should no longer exist.
This is one of my favourite reads of 2019. 5 Stars!
This was another buddy read with the wonderful Nat K, please check out her review when she posts it.
Rating: really liked it
Not as good as Daughters of Eve. But the life of Laila Tequila is beautifully told, as usual.
Rating: really liked it
An extraordinary novel: tender, sensual, compassionate, inclusive and steeped in atmosphere and detail, this is a love letter to Istanbul, to tolerance, to friendship. Read it now.
Rating: really liked it
This book has such moments of pure genius and honesty, and at times my heart felt so unbelievably full... However it also descended into somewhat of a farcical comedy during the course of Part Two so my feelings are very mixed.
The premise is utterly fascinating and is based on observations from a research paper published in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences (link here) that found an instance of brain wave activity in a person declared clinically dead for 10 minutes 38 seconds post-death.
The book takes this idea and uses these ten minutes and thirty eight seconds to explore the life of murder victim Tequila Leila in Part One, The Mind, as she experiences flashbacks of sort as her mind ultimately closes down after her untimely death.
Part One, The Mind, contained my favourite moments of the novel. We got to really get to know Leila. To understand her life's journey. To follow her childhood through to her escape to Istanbul where she ended up working in a brothel. This section explored the concept of blood family versus found family as we met each of Leila's five closest friends in turn and learned how much of an impact she had on their lives and vice versa. And also this section to me really discussed death in the most beautiful and natural of fashions. There was nothing to fear. Nothing was over played. I found it incredibly moving. I also loved how real historical events were incorporated into the storyline. How the book gave a real insight into what life was like in Istanbul especially during the 1960s and '70s.
This whole section was just beautifully written and I was incredibly invested in the storyline.
But once the book moved onto Part Two, The Body, the narrative shifted to a much more frivolous style of writing. The book turned to the absurd and the poignancy of Leila's death and life were lost to an almost slapstick comedy of errors as her five friends got caught up in a preposterous nighttime adventure as they endeavoured to bury her body.
This whole section just jarred so much with me that it nearly ruined the novel. It's why I'm rating this book three stars and not four. Because where I was once moved by Leila and her story, I now found myself rolling my eyes at her five friends. And I think that along with the farcical burial plot line this was also largely in part due to the poor characterisations of Leila's five besties. Instead of feeling truly authentic they all felt like caricatures or almost stereotype composites of the types of characters that would be #SquadGoals for a woman of little social standing.
What I am pleased about is that the story never attempted to solve Leila's murder, there was no talk of justice etc. Instead the focus was primarily on the tragedy of Leila's life and really highlighted social injustices that were prevalent during the setting of this book.
The book thankfully ended with a short Part Three that took the focus away from Leila's friends and instead centred on Leila and her soul but unfortunately even this touching ending couldn't salvage the book for me and ultimately it's an ambivalent three star rating that I am giving. A book that promised so much but sadly I feel somewhat shortchanged upon finishing it.
For more reviews and book related chat check out my blog
Rating: really liked it
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize after having been re read following its longlisting - my final comment proving prescient - and with additional comments added.
The book takes its cue from research that shows (as a medical examiner in the book reflects during an autopsy) which
“observed persistent brain activity in people who had died …. for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.”The subject of the autopsy is Leyla Akarsu, a mid-40s (albeit claiming to be ten years younger) Pera-based prostitute (who changed the spelling of her first name – trading the y of yesterday for the i of infinity – and was given the nickname Tequila by her madam), who was reported abducted and was found battered to death and dumped in a wheelie bin.
The book opens immediately after her death in 1990:
In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away. One last reserve of energy activated countless neurons, connecting them as though for the first time. Although her heart had stopped beating, her brain was resisting, a fighter till the end. It entered a state of heightened awareness, observing the demise of her body but not ready to accept its own end. Her memory surged forth, eager and diligent, collecting pieces of a life that she was speeding to a close. She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she believed to be lost forever. Time became fluid, a fast flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and present inseparable.
And the first section of the book (Mind) has each chapter taking place over one minute of her surging memories and fluid recollections (with one chapter for the thirty seconds, and one for the last eight), the Proustian nature of which takes its cue from the many conversations she had over nine years with a student activist and artist Ali (who defiantly adopted the nickname with which his racist German classmates had taunted him when they found out his artistic ambitions) who stumbles into the brothel after fleeing the police on the day of the riots following the visit of the US Sixth Fleet to Istanbul in 1968.
‘How did you end up here [in a brothel]” men always asked. And each time Leila told them a different story, depending on whatever she thought they might like to hear … But she wouldn’t do that with D/Ali and he never asked the question anyhow. Instead he wanted to know other things about her - what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give cities a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul. If ‘freedom’ were a type of food .. how did she think she would experience it on the tongue? And how about ‘fatherland”. D/Ali seemed to perceive the world through favours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells.
Each chapter starts with a different taste or smell – salt, lemon and sugar, cardamom coffee, watermelon, spice goat stew, wood burning stove, soil, Sulphuric acid, chocolate bonbons, deep fried street-food mussels, wedding cake, malt whisky, homemade strawberry cake - which unspool one of a series of seminal moments in Leila’s life, starting from her birth through to just before her death, as Leila’s life plays out against an occasional background of world and Istanbul events, and she answers for herself the question “How did you end up here [murdered]”.
We also meet “the five”, Leila’s five closest friends – Sabotage Sinan (a childhood friend), Nostalgia Nalan (a trans woman), Jameelah (a fellow prostitute people-trafficked from Somalia), Zaynabi122 (cleaner in the brothel, fortune telling Lebanese dwarf), and Hollywood Humeyra (a bar singer) – and learn in separate chapters about the tales of rejection, prejudice, trafficking, forced marriage and (in one case) unrequited love that lead them to Istanbul. These sections in particular seem designed to include many of the themes around which Shafak admirably campaigns, but this did not feel excessively forced.
The second section of the book “Body” is more conventional in its style and plot (and is based around a plot – in the (real life) Cemetery of the Companionless), if not in its ensemble. The five friends work together to give Leila’s body the end they believe it deserves and to prove that she is not companionless (with her "water" family stronger than her "blood" ones), in what ends as a brief but madcap grave robbing escapade culminating in a scene on the Bosphorus Bridge (which plays an important role in the novel).
The brief closing section follows her Soul on its journey into a peace she never found in her life.
The other key character in the book is Istanbul variously described as:
a liquid city; a mighty metropolis ... still not solidified .. water .. shifting, whirling, searching; [a city which] made killing easy, and dying even easier; an illusion, a magicians trick gone wrong; multiple Istanbul’s - struggling, competing, clashing ... [which] lived and breathed inside one another like matryoshka dollar”. A city which attracts Leila and her friends when the flee their former lives but which turns out very differently to their expectations and very hostile to the marginalised (despite adding as a magnet for them) and for women.
This is the third Shafak book I have read – she is always an author I have been disposed to like.
She writes about one of my favourite cities (which I used to visit for work); her talks and essays are clearly written and insightful; her activism across a whole range of causes admirable (as shown by the opposition she attracts, even recently from Turkish conservative authorities); her literary involvement shows great taste (most recently as Goldsmith judge and Wellcome Prize chair – both of which recognised the brilliant “Murmur” by Will Eaves and where she must have been the common factor).
And yet … my previous reads have been three stars – due to their implausibility of plot, rather overtly forced themes and really poor endings.
As a writer I am reminded of Zadie Smith – brilliant and admirable in so many ways, and yet just not quite able to convince me in a novel.
However this is the strongest of Shafak’s novels that I have read – the central conceit of the novel is an ingenious new way of approaching an old technique which goes back beyond Proust (memories evoked by sense) even to Lawrence Sterne (memories stretching back to birth), and functions as an excellent way to examine her themes.
The key moments that made Leila’s fate seemingly inevitable, which led to her lifelong but fully unjustified sense of guilt, and her perpetual status as undeserved victim, were I thought conveyed in a subtle but powerful way.
I was less enamored with the five, their backstories and with the Body part of the novel. This was I think, meant to be a deliberate, enlightened (if not entirely successful) twist on the Hollywood ensemble/buddy quest movie and which was designed to include two things that Shafak is keen to address in this book (and in much of her writing)
- Writing from the viewpoint of the outcasts, those on the peripheries of Turkish society
- Trying to reclaim urban Istanbul as a feminine space - the city always being seen as female in Byzantine days - e.g. (my example here rather then hers) the church of St Sophia as the most important in the City compared to St Peter's in Rome.
So overall a strong and enjoyable novel – and I would not be surprised to see the author this year receiving rather than giving out literary prize longlistings.
Rating: really liked it
This was... not good...
Rating: really liked it
Mindblowing.
A girl is dead. Or dying. Or dead. Or on the threshold of … A sneak peak into an entirely strange world.
We get a view on how things get results entirely different from the ones envisioned. So very many topics addressed: families, relations, identity, perception, religion and how it sometimes develops into something else, scary and foreign. This all is delivered in a package I couldn't resist. Incredible.
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Her name was Leila.
Tequila Leila … (c)
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she might take offence and playfully hurl a shoe – one of her high-heeled stilettos. (c)
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Never in a thousand years would she agree to be spoken of in the past tense. The very thought of it would make her feel small and defeated, and the last thing she wanted in this world was to feel that way. No, she would insist on the present tense – even though she now realized with a sinking feeling that her heart had just stopped beating, and her breathing had abruptly ceased, and whichever way she looked at her situation there was no denying that she was dead. (c)
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This early in the morning they would be fast asleep, each trying to find the way out of their own labyrinth of dreams. (c)
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There was so much she wanted to know. In her mind she kept replaying the last moments of her life, asking herself where things had gone wrong – a futile exercise since time could not be unravelled as though it were a ball of yarn. (c)
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In the sky high above, a sliver of yesterday’s moon was visible, bright and unreachable, like the vestige of a happy memory. She was still part of this world, and there was still life inside her, so how could she be gone? How could she be no more, as though she were a dream that fades at the first hint of daylight? Only a few hours ago she was singing, smoking, swearing, thinking … well, even now she was thinking. It was remarkable that her mind was working at full tilt – though who knew for how long. She wished she could go back and tell everyone that the dead did not die instantly, that they could, in fact, continue to reflect on things, including their own demise. People would be scared if they learned this, she reckoned. She certainly would have been when she was alive. But she felt it was important that they knew. (c)
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How could you possibly change gears the moment you walked out of an office where you had spent half your life and squandered most of your dreams? (c)
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At some level invisible to the human eye, opposites blended in the most unexpected ways. (c)
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The five of them: Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122 and Hollywood Humeyra. (c) Ok, this is taking a bit too far the talking names thingy.
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How could seemingly sane minds be so consumed with all those crazy scenarios of asteroids, fireballs and comets wreaking havoc on the planet? As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying. (c)
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The old woman was widely respected in the neighbourhood, and considered, for all her eccentricities and reclusiveness, to be one of the uncanny ones – those who had two sides to their personality, one earthly, one unearthly, and who, like a coin tossed into the air, could at any time reveal either face. (c)
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When men asked – and they often did – why she insisted on spelling ‘Leyla’ as ‘Leila’, and whether by doing so she was trying to make herself seem Western or exotic, she would laugh and say that one day she went to the bazaar and traded the ‘y’ of ‘yesterday’ for the ‘i’ of ‘infinity’, and that was that. (c)
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the thought she kept returning to was this: all these years she had been scared of make-believe Gypsies who kidnapped small children and turned them into hollow-eyed beggars, but maybe the people she should be fearing were in her own home. Maybe it was they who had snatched her from her mother’s arms.
For the first time she was able to stand back and regard herself and her family from a mental distance; and what she found out made her uncomfortable. She had always assumed they were a normal family, like any other in the world. Now she wasn’t so sure. What if there was something different about them – something inherently wrong? (c)
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As the tastes of lemon and sugar melted on her tongue, so too her feelings dissolved into confusion. … Just as the sour could hide beneath the sweet, or vice versa, within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity. (c)
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To this day she had been careful not to show her love for her mother when Auntie was around. From now on she would have to keep her love for her aunt a secret from Mother as well. Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden – that such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards. This was the only form of affection she had learned from grown-ups, and the teaching would come with dire consequences. (c)
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… she had a tendency to do everything to excess: she smoked too much, swore too much, shouted too much and was simply too much of a presence in their lives – a veritable maximum dose. (c)
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She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them. (c)
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Tell me, was your mother also a hygiene freak?’
That made Leila stop cold. No more itching. (c)
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A few of the labourers had a good voice, and they liked to sing, taking turns in leading. In a world they could neither fully understand nor prevail in, music was the only joy that was free of charge. (c)
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This city always surprised her; moments of innocence were hidden in its darkest corners, moments so elusive that by the time she realized how pure they were, they would be gone. (c)
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… Istanbul, the city where all the discontented and all the dreamers eventually ended up. (c)
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Her life, like a door, had closed, and she was eager for another to open elsewhere. He who has not travelled in the world has no eyes, she thought. (c)
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Once our spirits are broken, they know we won’t go anywhere. … She was thinking, maybe she was only a half-broken horse, too frightened to bolt, too lame to dare, but still able to remember the sweet taste of, and therefore to yearn for, freedom. (c)
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She would go to a place where she could create herself anew. … You could traverse deserts, climb mountains, sail oceans and beat giants, so long as you had a crumb of hope in your pocket. (c)
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Make friends, good ones. Loyal ones. No one can survive alone – except the Almighty God. And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan. (c)
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Here comes a boy named Ali … what an idiot, he thinks he is Dali! It had cut him to the core of his being, the endless jeering, the barbs. But one day, when a new teacher asked everyone in the class to introduce themselves, he leaped to his feet first, and said with a steady, confident smile: ‘Hi, my name is Ali, but I like it better when people call me D/Ali.’ From then on the snide comments had stopped, but he, headstrong and independent, had started using, and even enjoying, what was once a hurtful nickname. (с)
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It was the expression on his face, as if he were perpetually dissatisfied or disenchanted with what he saw, what he heard, what he couldn’t bring himself to be part of. (c)
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Her father-in-law’s dentures, soaking in a glass of water beside the box, smiled conspiratorially. (c)
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She wondered whether, just as too many cooks spoiled the broth, too many revolutionaries could ruin a revolution, but once again she kept her thoughts to herself. (c)
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She had often thought five was a special number. The Torah contained five books. Jesus had suffered five fatal wounds. Islam had five pillars of faith. King David had killed Goliath with five pebbles. In Buddhism there were five paths, while Shiva revealed five faces, looking out in five different directions. Chinese philosophy revolved around five elements: water, fire, wood, metal, earth. There were five universally accepted tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Human perception depended on five basic senses: hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste; even though scientists claimed there were more, each with a baffling name, it was the original five that everyone knew. (c)
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They had spent that evening chatting and laughing, as if nothing could ever pull them apart and life were merely a spectacle, exciting and unsettling, but without any real danger involved, like being invited to someone else’s dream. (c)
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Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong. (c)
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Truth could be corrosive, a mercurial liquor. It could eat holes in the bulwarks of daily life, destroying entire edifices. (c)
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‘Why did you allow Yourself to be so widely misunderstood, my beautiful and merciful God?’ (c)
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‘I feel … I think … I’m inside a grave.’
‘Yes, we can tell,’ said Nalan.
‘Don’t panic, my dear,’ said Zaynab122. ‘Think about it this way. You’re facing your fear, it’s good for you.’ (c)
Rating: really liked it
A metaphor dense ode to outsiders and Istanbul - 4 starsRules are rules. Even children knew this was not true. Rules were sometimes rules. At other times, depending on the circumstances, they were empty words, absurd phrases or jokes without a punchline. Rules were sieves with holes so large that all sorts of things could pass through; rules were sticks of chewing gum that had long lost their taste but could not be spat out; rules in this country, and across the entire Middle East, were anything but rules.Death of the body and...Elif Shafak starts her book unconventionally, with her main character, Tequila Leila, looking back at her life, in the last minutes of her life when the oxygen to her brain is running out.
We follow Leyla from her birth, full of superstitions and rituals (including covering a baby in salt to get her to cry and her mother not eating spices during the pregnancy to avoid freckles on her newborn) to the confrontations of puberty.
Her father is a traditional, a bit troubled man (
At times he recognized that something was broken inside him and he dearly wished he could mend it, but these thoughts never led him anywhere), and has two wives to be able to conceive offspring.
For me this had a strange synchronicity with Wolf Hall and Henry VIII his tribulations, which I read a month earlier.
Her best friend is the son of a pharmacist. This pharmacist hands out condoms to a woman who already had 11 children; a few days later the woman returns with stomach ache because she ate them when she couldn’t convince her husband to use them.
Maybe it will help, I thought the woman says to her.
The struggle between modernity and traditionalism is only one of the heavy themes Shafak takes on with apparent ease in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World: child abuse, self mutilation, the mental illness of her "auntie" and an Armenian family living in the house in Van before Leyla her grandfather gets the house for his dutiful diligence in deporting the Armenians in the region.
It is no wonder that Leyla thinks about the end of childhood eloquently under these circumstances:
Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.I must say I liked the childhood sections most of this book, I think this part of life fits best with the metaphor rich style of Shafak. In later sections the love for Istanbul shines through brilliantly, but the travails of the characters as such made a bit less impact on me. Not to say nothing happens, far from it, we have honour killings and acid attacks while en passant we get insights in contentious periods of Turkish history during the 60's and 70's.
In this history women in general and prostitutes in particular don't have it easy in the slightest. The same goes for marginalised people in general (Leila’s best friends comprise someone with dwarfism, an introvert, a transgender, a trafficked African woman and a wife leaving her abusive husband) who are introduced through short stories by Shafak.
The love lost and found while Leila worked at a brothel was quite moving. And the scene where a gay son is forced by his father to have sex with Leila, to ensure that he has experience in his arranged marriage (
He stared at his father, studying his stern features as though to memorize what he refused to become) was also hard hitting for me.
... soring of the mind and soul‘Grief is a swallow’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming it’s feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’This book is only halfway through when Leila (physically) dies. We are introduced during the first section of the book to a heartwarming cast of five outcasts, all bound together by Leila and Istanbul.
What follows is a little sweet and American teenager movie like in feel, in the way people gang up for a common goal, against all odds etc.
I like the whole idea of friendship transcending death and all, but found this part less convincing.
Also while reading the second section, I felt that I couldn’t remember how Leila met the five who come back so much, taking a bit of the emotional impact her death has on them for me.
At the end of the book we have the very touching and real acknowledgments by Shafak. She ties the book to the passing away of the grandmother with whom she grew up with, and how she could not visit her grave due to the political circumstances in Turkey. It's a real life echo that makes the end of the book both touching but also a bit overly sentimental.
All in all this novel was a satisfying and deeply humane look into the history of Turkey and it's marginalised citizens, against the lush canvas of Istanbul. I Look forward to reading more of Shafak!
