What keeps you going on living...

It took Filiz Ali, the daughter of one of Turkey’s most accomplished writers, Sabahattin Ali, almost 60 years to get the English translation of her father’s bestseller, Madonna in a Fur Coat, published. That translation — by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe — came out in 2016 and allows readers a window into why this novel of unrequited love continues to be a bestseller in Turkey.

When the book came out in 1943, Ali was already a well-known writer and thorn in the side of the Turkish government, writing pieces exposing the state’s shortcomings and authoritarianism. He was often imprisoned along with his leftist intellectual comrades and on returning to the civil service after being blacklisted for a while, attempted to live a conventional life. Ali, however, couldn’t repress his anti-establishment tendencies and carried on publishing. Five years after the publication of Madonna in a Fur Coat, he was assassinated on Turkey’s border with Bulgaria, which he’d been trying to cross.

Madonna in a Fur Coat begins with the unnamed narrator reflecting on an acquaintance, Raif Efendi, who’d left a great impression on him. This is despite the fact that Raif is, as the narrator says, someone who was “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? What philosophy drives them, as they wander the earth?’” We soon learn how the two first meet. After a period of unemployment, the narrator joins a firm in Ankara that “traded in machinery but also involved itself in forestry and timber”.  Raif is also employed there, translating contracts and documents from Turkish to German. The narrator’s curiosity about this quiet, diffident man who spends his free moments reading German novels is piqued when he spots Raif’s caricature of their boss that masterfully “captured the man’s essence”. When Raif falls ill for a long stretch, the narrator visits him at home and finds a household dominated by selfish, exploitative relatives.

When Raif asks for his belongings from the office, the narrator finds among them a notebook that is clearly a personal journal. He asks for permission to read the notebook — “Raif Bey, please try and understand me!… I want to understand people. Most of all, I want to understand what people did to you.”

So the narrator — and the reader — get to learn Raif’s back story, of his time as a young man in Berlin in the 1930s, where he’d been sent to learn the ins and outs of soap manufacturing by his wealthy and ambitious father. One day, he goes to an art exhibition by up-and-coming artists and is transfixed by the self-portrait of Maria Puder, a painting that has been nicknamed Madonna in a Fur Coat by the critics. He falls in love — as David Selim Sayers puts it in his introduction to the Penguin edition — “in the most Ottoman way imaginable, by looking at her picture rather than her person…”.

But Maria, a strident feminist, who notices Raif’s devotion to her painting (he keeps visiting it), can’t return his affections in the same way. Raif quietly accepts that there can never be anything more than friendship between them. But even this can’t go on for long — this is 1930s Germany and the Nazis are in power. There won’t be any happily-ever-afters. Such is the nature of young love, Ali seems to be telling us: precious and fleeting and affecting the meek as much as the bold. None of us can escape it. In an interview with the BBC, Filiz Ali said that the message of a novel as melancholic as this— if the reader was to look for one — was “about sincerity in love… Love for love’s sake. This is what keeps you going on living.”

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at saudha.substack.com