April 2026: Romance
A little about this month's book:
"Madonna in a Fur Coat tells a story with a frame that some find even more interesting than the actual story. The main story follows a young, fragile Turkish man’s love for a charismatic German artist. The narrator of the frame story, meanwhile, is an unnamed twenty-five-old banker. The narrator is introduced to us after he loses his modest post in a bank. Like Sabahattin Ali, he is a dreamy young man in love with books and is considered a failure by people whose cruelties towards the less fortunate he never fails to see... While watching workers march alongside the façade of the People’s House, an official building of the republican regime, the narrator comes across an old classmate, Hamdi, now a successful businessman, who invites him to his house. With a few masterly brush strokes, Ali draws a portrait of New Turkey’s model middle-class family: modern, childless, efficient, and condescending... The second part of the novel focuses on Raif Efendi, the German translator at Hamdi’s firm, who shares an office with the narrator. Raif is an older, quiet man, and Hamdi interprets his reluctant demeanor as a sign of weakness. A comradeship is born between the shy narrator and the shy interpreter, both oppressed by the conventions of middle-class life.
The night before his death, Raif Efendi allows [Hamdi] to read his accounts of his adventures in his twenties, when he lived in Berlin...
His favorite Berlin place is the Nationalgalerie, where he comes across a striking painting: Selbstportrat by the twenty-five-year-old Maria Puder. The young artist had painted herself in the manner of Andrea del Sarto’s Mother Mary in Madonna delle Arpie. Her “strange, formidable, haughty and almost wide expression” is striking to Raif, and he’s magnetically drawn to “this pale face, this dark brown hair, this dark brow, these dark eyes that spoke of eternal anguish and resolve.” She echoes all the women that had fascinated Raif in books; he sees the protagonists of Turkish classics as well as Cleopatra and “Muhammad’s mother, Amine Hatun, of whom I had dreamed while listening to the Mevlit prayers.”
Sabahattin Ali wrote the novel in four months, from November 1940 to February 1941, while serving in the Turkish military. It was originally published in the Turkish newspaper Hakikat, where it was serialized in forty-eight parts. Readers of Hakikat found the novel weird; the serialization was a failure. The book version appeared in 1943, at a time when German influence was making itself increasingly felt in Turkey: racist clubs were becoming popular throughout the country; suspected communists, Ali included, were being watched by MIT, Turkey’s intelligence agency. In 1940, a magazine article denounced Sabahattin Ali as an effeminate degenerate. Ali was accused of poisoning Turkish youth with his novels and short stories and was characterized as a slavish, cowardly man of impure blood.
In April 1948, after being denied a passport, Sabahattin Ali attempted to enter Bulgaria illegally, walking the border with Ali Ertekin, a migrant from Yugoslavia. Two months later, his body was found near the border city of Edirne (Ertekin would confess to the murder years later). By the time Ali’s death was announced, Orhan Kemal had been released from prison. Just a few years later, the Democrat Party won Turkey’s first freely held elections. A few weeks after that, Nazım Hikmet and Kemal Tahir were also released—Hikmet escaped to the USSR via Romania and was stripped of his nationality by the ruling Democrat Party. Tahir stayed in Turkey, where he became famous for his mixture of Marxism and Ottomanism.
Since its first publication, Madonna has sold more than seven hundred thousand copies. In March 2016, Turkish Librarians Association announced its most borrowed books of the year: Madonna topped the list. It was also the best-selling Turkish novel of 2015. In the 2000s, Ali gained a reputation as the greatest prose writer of 1930s and 1940s Turkish literature: critics and readers finally seemed to agree with Hikmet. Nowadays Madonna in a Fur Coat can be found in Turkey’s supermarkets, where it is sold alongside detergent and toothpaste.
