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Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali: book review



Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943, English version 2016) is set in in Germany in the early 1920s and in Turkey in 1941.

In Istanbul, Turkey, the narrator has been sacked from his bank job. Unemployed, he meets his long-time friend Hamdi, who secures him a clerical job. At Hamdi’s place of employment, the narrator shares an office with the German translator Raif Efendi.

The narrator is struck by Efendi’s presence: ‘’Of all the people I have chanced upon in life, there is no one who has left a greater impression.’’ But others workers despise Efendi because he is quiet and a loner, adept at character sketches of people at work, which he draws secretly.

Raif Efendi is constantly absent from work through pleurisy, an inflammation of the lungs. To understand his illness, and the man, the story goes back 20 years, when, at age 24, Efendi was living in Berlin.

Efendi attends an art exhibition: ‘’I cannot describe the torrent that swept through me in that moment. I only remember standing, transfixed, before a portrait of a woman wearing a fur coat … She was a swirling blend of all the women I had ever imagined.’’ He refers to the woman as Madonna in a Fur Coat – ‘’the pale, long-nosed, dark-eyed woman draped in the skin of a wildcat.’’

Through Efendi’s diary notes, the woman is revealed: her name, her profession, her character, and the indelible impact she had on him. It is the woman that has shaped his life and character from that moment in the early 1920s for the next 20 years. And it is this that spellbinds the narrator as the bond with Efendi strengthens between them.

This novel, though set in a specific period and location, is timeless in its themes of desire, love, obsession, imagination, and the ties that bind people together. It is also of the fragility of these connections, and the swiftness that tears them apart, not so much by people’s actions, but by their inactions. It’s quite an interesting novel.  











 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).



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