

He rushes off to buy a print-and only then it occurs to him that his Madonna, the one in the fur coat, must “exist in real life”. A newspaper article on the exhibition compares the painting to Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna delle Arpie. Hoping to learn more, he dives into the exhibition catalogue, but only finds “Maria Puder, Selbsporträt”. I had known that woman since I’d opened my first book at the age of seven - since I’d started, at the age of five, to dream… She was a swirling blend of all the women I had ever imagined. Surely I knew this pale face, this dark brown hair, this dark brow, these dark eyes that spoke of eternal anguish and resolve. In one of these, he is struck by a “portrait of a woman wearing a fur coat.” He is transfixed: Assiduously ignoring paternal directions which arrive periodically in the post, he wanders the streets and frequents art galleries. Instead, he learns German and devours books, especially Russian fiction.

The core of Madonna in a Fur Coat is the account of a love affair between Raif, a feckless young man from Ankara who, addicted to romantic novels, has been sent by his father to Berlin to learn something useful like how to make luxury soap. Madonna in a Fur Coat, Sabahattin Ali, Maureen Freely (trans), Alexander Dawe (trans) (Penguin Classic, February 2017 Other Press,October 2017) 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. “It is,” continued Freely, “read, loved and wept over … most of all by young adults.” Yet in the past few years, the final novel of dissident Turkish author Sabahattin Ali has come into its own: this melancholic story of a doomed romance has for three years topped the Turkish bestseller lists, outselling-according to an account in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet-Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s recent A Strangeness in My Mind by 50%. “When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943,” wrote Maureen Freely, one of the two translators of the recent English-language edition, in the Guardian, “it made no impression whatsoever.”

M adonna in a Fur Coat has a backstory almost as long as the novel itself.
