Madonna in a Fur Coat, by Sabahattin Ali, was first published in Istanbul in 1943.

It's a tragic story. A painfully shy young Turkish man is sent by his father to Berlin to learn about the soap business he is set to inherit. In the heady climate of the post-World War I capital, he meets a free-spirited young German woman, an artist by passion but a cabaret singer by necessity.

Neither of them is an easy kind of person to understand, but their friendship and mutual respect eventually blossom into love.

Fatefully, though, Raif has to return to Turkey on the death of his father. Maria is supposed to join him, but their communication peters out. Raif has to face the fact that the relationship has foundered, and this realization literally breaks his spirit. When we first come across him, seen through the eyes of a young co-worker, he is married to someone he doesn't really love, is surrounded by family members who have no respect for him, and works in a company where he is abused and taken for granted (his inheritance having come to nothing). For his young colleague, he is a "tiresome blank of a man".

He eventually finds out that the reason Maria has stopped communicating is that she has died, leaving a baby -- his baby -- in the care of a relative.

But he carries his disappointment for the rest of his life: "The pain of losing something precious -- be it earthly happiness or material wealth -- can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it."

Ali very effectively captures the zeitgeist of the inter-war years, and a kind of Gloomy Sunday intensity infuses the book.

But the most intriguing thing about it is its ongoing popularity: "For the past three years [2013-16], it has topped the bestseller list in Turkey, outselling Orhan Pamuk. It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults. And no one seems able to explain why..."


The photos in this post were taken last year in Ankara, where the novel opens





Some observers focus their explanations on the enduring power of the love story, seeing Madonna in a Fur Coat as "a profound, moving meditation on love and loss".

Despite the tragic outcome, the passion it portrays is something that people still find inspiring: "Posting a picture of the book alongside, for example, a cup of coffee has become one of the most popular images on the social media accounts of Turkish youngsters in recent years."

The progressive flavour of Raif and Maria's relationship is also intriguing: "Nine years before the publication of The Second Sex and 20 years before The Feminine Mystique, a male Turkish communist novelist created a fictional feminist character who is the heroine of a love story that suggests an egalitarian heterosexual courtship can be based on honesty, candor, and mutual respect."

It would certainly be interesting to determine the extent to which the novel's current popularity is indeed fuelled by the fluid gender roles and relationships it portrays. Maria is significantly more masculine and avant-garde, and Raif significantly more feminine and open, than the society of their era (or this era?) would wholly approve of.

Some illustrations:

Maria has "a voice so low it almost sounded like a man's... She sang songs that quivered with longing, as if the words were tumbling out of a drunken boy's mouth..." She says of herself: "Just know that I am always completely open ... like a man. I'm like a man in many other ways, too... And you're a bit like a woman!"

At one point, she lashes out: "Do you know why I hate you? You and every other man in the world? Because you ask so much of us, as if it were your natural right... [Men] are the hunters, you see. And we their miserable prey... What I hate most is women always having to be passive... My girlfriends had a hard time finding things in common with me. They had no interest in being real people: they preferred to be objects of desire and act like dolls. I couldn't make friends with boys either. They'd look for a soft centre and when they saw it wasn't there, when they saw I was a match for them, they'd run away."





For other observers, however, the novel's contemporary resonance is politically motivated.

Ali himself went to Berlin as a young man. When he returned to Turkey, and took up various positions as a teacher of German, he was viewed with suspicion, and twice spent time in prison. Then, in 1945, he was definitively removed from his post: "He moved from Ankara to Istanbul, to be drawn into the struggle against the fascists then dominating Turkey's single party state. The reward was a relentless hate campaign, which branded him and his fellow writers as traitors and Soviet sympathisers..."

After another spell in prison, Ali came to the conclusion that he would have to flee Turkey. A smuggler claimed to have taken him to the Bulgarian border, and murdered him. "However, it is commonly believed that Ali died while being interrogated by the National Security Service... It is impossible to read of his ordeals without finding contemporary echoes [in the shape of attacks on journalists and publishers]... When Ali's readers cry for him, they are also crying for themselves."

I don't know Turkey well enough to judge which thread is the strongest element in the novel's continuing appeal. But as an atmospheric little cameo that succeeds in being both inspiring and sobering, it is surely quite unique.