Ali has the narrator lay down some key lessons of this tale near the beginning of trying to see Rafe’s hidden layers: And here we come to what the novelist and critic Kaya Genç sees as the key to the mystery of Ali’s suddenly renewed fame. His least acclaimed novel has become Turkey’s most celebrated love story today because it refuses the traditional gender roles that Turkey’s president seems hell-bent on enforcing, not just in the religious heartlands but also in the cities and towns that have been secularising, and liberalising, for almost a century. Anyone who departs from his retrograde norms, he decries as traitors or terrorists in the making. During last year’s election campaign, he went so far as to accuse Turkey’s LGBT community as being in league with Armenians, Kurds, and the hostile foreign powers that funded them. Hardly a day passes without his saying what a woman should be, and what a man – a real man – should do to keep her in her place.

As it did for Sabahattin Ali. Born in 1907 in what is now Bulgaria but was then part of the crumbling Ottoman empire, he, too, went to Berlin as a young man, and his 18 months there turned him into a freethinking man. Returning to Turkey with trunks of books, he was sent to teach German in the provincial city of Aydin, and it was here that he did his first short stint in prison, accused of poisoning his students’ minds with dangerous ideas. After his release, he moved on to a job in the city of Konya, to be imprisoned again, after having been found guilty of reciting a poem critical of Ataturk. Told that he would never again find work as a teacher unless he was able to prove that he had changed his thinking, he published a poem in praise of Ataturk, entitled “My Love”. Come and see me tomorrow morning!" he said now. "We'll see if we can figure something out for you. You have a good brain in that head of yours. You were always pretty lazy, too, but that's not important. Experience is the best teacher! ... Don't forget now. Get there early."

Retailers:

Neither Hamdi nor I had changed since yesterday evening. We were who we were. But having discovered a few things about each other, we had allowed these minute details to send us on diverging paths. The strangest thing was that we both accepted this change in our relations, and even found it natural. I felt anger neither at him nor at myself. All I wanted was not to be here. This has been something of a slow burn—Freely says the book had long been “the sort of book that passed from friend to friend”, and it has been in the been in the Turkish “top ten” lists for a decade, according to the agency that holds the rights, a period that overlaps perhaps not entirely coincidentally with the tenure of Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—but it is nevertheless rather as if The Great Gatsby were outselling, if not Dan Brown, then Jonathan Franzen or Maya Angelou. Time was when Hamdi and I had seen a great deal of each other, but since losing my job I'd not seen him at all. I knew him to be making a good living as an assistant director of a firm that traded in machinery but also involved itself in forestry and timber. And that was precisely why I had not sought him out after losing my job: I feared that he might think I'd come asking for a loan, not a job.

At the outset of the novel, the narrator is unemployed and beginning to isolate himself from everyone around him as a result of his joblessness. An old classmate of the narrator’s, named Hamdi, offers the narrator a job that the narrator accepts despite his misgivings about the work and about Hamdi’s condescending attitude. The narrator begins his new job and shares an office with a man named Raif Efendi who has worked at the firm for several years without advancing. Although everyone treats Raif with disrespect, the narrator becomes intrigued by him and seeks to get to know Raif better. During one of Raif’s frequent bouts of illness, the narrator visits him at his home and sees how little affection and respect is shown to Raif by his family. Raif asks the narrator to collect his things from his desk. The narrator discovers a notebook in Raif’s desk that Raif asks the narrator to burn. The narrator pleads with Raif to allow him to read the contents of the notebook before he destroys it. Raif agrees. In fact, he is slow to recognize that the elegant woman in the painting, the outspoken intellectual artist, and the common dancehall performer are one in the same person. I loved how Rafe’s coming to us in layers is matched by layers he must parse in his love interest. I got some nice zings of wisdom out of the portrayal of love as involving both a selfless and selfish dimensions, such as this highlighting of how sudden love spurs us to reach far while at the same time exposing our yawning needs: he was rather ordinary, with no distinguishing features – no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a normal day. Indeed, there was no part of his life – public or private – that might give rise to curiosity.

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The account of a tender, doomed romance written by Ali, a Turk who was dangerously political and died mysteriously in 1948, is set in 1920s Berlin. Delicate and poignant, it weaves quite a spell.” —Irish Times There’s one thing you must remember. This all ends the moment you want something from me. You can’t ask me for anything …Anything—do you hear! Only then did I remember that he'd invited me to supper. But it seemed to have slipped his mind entirely as well. I made for the door. As I took my hat, I said, "Please pass on my respects to your wife!" His house was small but charming, his wife homely but amiable. Without embarrassment, they kissed each other. Then Hamdi left me to go and wash.