About a quarter of the way into Elif Shafak’s 11th novel, a little girl zones out of a family drama by pondering a herd of deer depicted on a Persian carpet beneath her feet. “Not all of the deer are following the rules” she notices. One is poised to canter off towards what the child imagines is a sun-filled valley, full of willows and scented grasslands. She wants to jump on its back and escape.
In 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World that is exactly what the child eventually does. It’s the story of Leyla, later known as “Tequila Leila” who, along with her five friends, finds herself in Istanbul, a city where “all the discontented and all the dreamers end up”. Unfortunately, we first encounter our heroine dead, in a wheelie bin.
Leila’s murder will be seen on national TV, somewhere between coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation and the US invasion of Iraq. But for the duration of time that that scientists now estimate the brain remains active after death, Leila is not concerned with this; she is taking a magical mystery tour of her life and the reader is going with her.
Leila remembers her life minute by minute, through random tastes, smells and events. As a child, she is baffled by a quagmire of family dysfunction. The scant love she is shown is duplicitous, her unstable mother is “ghost like”, condemned to life as a baby machine, undergoing multiple pregnancies and miscarriages.
As she grows, we catch glimpses of Turkish life in the 1950s and 1960s, of civil changes as students campaigned for social justice and women wore mini-skirts. Her father becomes a religious fanatic, quoting “forty signs of the apocalypse” and assuring his daughter that an unforgiving Allah will damn all unbelievers and blasphemers. Her mother and aunt take the veil and as a rebel teen, and Leila is confined to the home. It doesn’t stop her damnation, however, since from early childhood, she has been sexually abused by an uncle. Her own pregnancy and miscarriage, and her family’s protection of the Uncle according to the rules of honour, prompt her to escape to the capital.
There, it takes all of minutes before her bag is stolen in the bus station and a girl with a dream becomes a commodity in any capital’s oldest marketplace. She has five true friends: Sabotage Sinan, a social misfit who follows her to the city; Nostalgia Nalan, a transgender person once destined to be a farmer, Jameelah, a trafficked young Somali woman; Zaynab122, from a mountain village in Lebanon and Hollywood Humeyrah, a big screen wannabe turned mafia club singer.
Often structuring her novels by juxtaposing generations or continents, here Shafak stays in Istanbul, circling through Leila and her friends to deliver a memorable tale with humour and intensity. Although the depth to which we can know each character is - perhaps inevitably -marred somewhat by its ambitious scope (six lives in 10 minutes), as with all of this author’s works, it is fuelled by a vivid, sensual passion and enriched by her signature fusion of fact and fiction.
One pivotal scene takes place on May 1st, 1977 when demonstrators on Taksim Square were gunned by down by snipers from an adjacent hotel. We are instantly reminded of the recent ban by Turkish authorities on a march planned in Taksim Square for May Day 2019. The cemetery where the fictional Leila is buried is today the resting place of many of the souls that have washed up on Turkish shores in recent years from Africa and the Middle East.
More than in any of her works thus far, Istanbul itself is a powerful narrative force. The author uses the formidable city and its history like a lens through which to explore her recurring themes of women’s rights, gender equality, political repression and the fate of migrants in an increasingly populist Europe. In this way, the early-seventies story of a prostitute and her band of renegade mates is at once that of Tequila Leila, but also a take on a contemporary Mediterranean metropolis experiencing a political and cultural crisis and challenged by the movement of 21st century populations.
Shafak has said, “a conversation with the past is another way of talking to the present”. It’s the aspect of her work that draws most of her readers and which has made her one of Turkey’s best selling novelists. With this latest title, she does not disappoint.
