Elif Shafak, who writes in both Turkish and English, is the most widely read female author in her native country
of Elif Shafak’s 11th novel is dead when it begins. It is 1990, and the body of “Tequila Leila” has been dumped in a wheelie bin on the outskirts of Istanbul; yet, somehow, her mind remains active. “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.
In this book, Leila is a sex worker who comes to Istanbul from the distant eastern city of Van. Her childhood, her youth and the chain of events that lead to her death unspool through the sense-memories which haunt her as those 10 minutes and 38 seconds pass. Salt, cardamom coffee, spiced goat stew, sulphuric acid: each is a clue to a past that, during her life, she was in flight from. Memory, for her, is “a graveyard”.
In death, the graves open. Leila’s father had two wives; when she was born, she was given from the second to the childless first. The weight of this secret distorts Leila’s life, as other damaging secrets corrode the whole clan. Five stalwart friends help her survive. Their own narratives punctuate the novel; together they form a family far more loving than the one Leila escapes.
Ms Shafak weaves the history of modern Turkey through her story, sometimes glancingly and sometimes more directly, as when Leila is caught up in a bloody clash between protesters and police in 1977. Yet this book is also a love-letter to Istanbul, which “like a lover’s face” is “receding in the mist”. By the end Ms Shafak persuades the reader to care powerfully about Leila, as the novel comes to a sorrowful but redemptive conclusion.
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