Wednesday 27 November 2019

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World


Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for just a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?
As 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World begins, middle-aged Istanbul sex worker Tequila Leila – born in the small Turkish town of Van in 1947 and officially given the names Leyla Afife Kamile – has been murdered, her body dumped in a rubbish bin. Completely aware of her situation, Leila is bemused to find her memory drifting randomly over the events of her life, and as the minutes and seconds (as per the title) count up, the reader is led on a journey that encompasses much of the variety of life for women in Turkey (and especially in Istanbul) for the period of Leila's life, up to her death in 1990. This book is much more about history and social commentary than characters and a plumbing of the human heart, and while I completely recognise the value of commemorating the lives of those who might otherwise remain voiceless, the basic writing and the tonal shift of the second part left me rather underwhelmed. Good, not great, for me.
Three minutes had passed since Leila's heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee – strong, intense, dark. A taste forever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul. It was rather strange that this should follow on the heels of her recollections of childhood. But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.
The first sections, counting away Leila's post-death minutes and seconds, were maybe a little gimmicky to play out as long as they do, but I did like how author Elif Shafak has Leila link every memory to a strong scent: lemon and sugar reminding her of how her mother's friends would gather for raucous leg-waxing parties; the scent of watermelon reminding Leila of the hot summer that her extended family spent at the seaside; a summer that would change the course of her life. Between her family life as a child and her experiences working in a licensed brothel in Istanbul, Leila's story (and those of the four women she meets in the city who will become her closest friends), explore a wide ranging (if all basically repressed) variety of life for Turkish women. In the background, larger historical events play out (the Turkish army joining the Americans in the Korean War, the 1968 protests against the arrival of the US Navy's Sixth Fleet in Istanbul, the student massacre in Taksim Square in 1977), and while I do feel like I learned a lot about Turkey from this time period, I had a lingering sense that Shafak had been working through a checklist of everything that she wanted her readers to learn; details weren't quite organic.
Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in the world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home.
Shafak's dedication reads: To the women of Istanbul, and the city of Istanbul, which is, and has always been, a she-city. Shafak then proceeds to populate her story with outsider women: one transgendered, one a little person, one an illegal African immigrant, one a cabaret singer who had fled a stifling marriage (and again, I had the sense of a checklist being ticked off somewhere). Along with Leila's childhood best friend (the token male of the group who came to Istanbul in order to watch over Leila), these women form Leila's “five”; her “water family”. After Leila's ten minutes, thirty-eight seconds are up, the omniscient point-of-view shifts to these friends as they gather outside the medical examiner's office, demanding their friend's body for a proper burial. Unfortunately, Turkish law is clear that where a body is unclaimed by blood relations, it can only be disposed of, without ceremony or religious ritual, in an unmarked grave in a place like the Cemetery of the Companionless in Kilyos (an actual cemetery, now famous as the last resting place for those would-be refugees who wash up on Turkey's shores). In what I found to be a jarring shift in tone, the plot from here becomes a bit of a slapstick caper (yet ends in an appropriate place).

10 Minutes – in what I interpreted to be its primary intent: the commemoration of those who might otherwise remain voiceless – reminded me very much of the Man Booker-co-winning Girl, Woman, Other. And while I did have some impatience with that book's literary pretensions, it was, very much so, literary. By contrast, I found Shafak's writing here to be very basic (metaphors, in particular, were frequent and clunky), and the swerve towards humour, unnecessary. And yet, I do appreciate what I have learned about Turkey, and the lives of Turkish women, and am pleased that this book was longlisted for the Booker, thereby coming to my attention. It deserves to be read.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:




Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.
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