10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This World

This novel exposed me to the religion, superstition, history, and customs of a region of the world I don’t know a lot about. In turns, I was horrified, fascinated, amused, angry, sad. In showing us the good, the bad and the ugly, the author does a great job of getting across the love she has for Turkey. There’s a lot of heart in this book.

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'‘Well, we all kind of recognize each other by now, and even if we don’t, we can easily make a guess about someone based on the way they look.’

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Clothes were political. And so was facial hair – particularly the moustache. The nationalists wore theirs pointing downwards, in the shape of a crescent moon. The Islamists kept theirs clipped, small and neat. The Stalinists preferred walrus-like moustaches that looked as if they had never seen a razor. D/Ali himself was always clean-shaven. Leila didn’t know if this gave off a political message, and, if so, of what kind exactly.

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I like how the novel is broken into pieces (Body, Mind, and Soul) and how the author honed in on each. In the first piece, we are treated to minute-by-minute facts about a dead body as well as memories of her life, each of which have associated scents and tastes. In the second piece, we are introduced to the circle of her friends. In the last bit, we experience the liberation of her soul.

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The main theme is friendship: how the relationship with chosen people is often deeper, more accepting, loving, and longer-lasting than our relationship with family.

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Should his wife divorce him on grounds of his night life with tarts and transvestites, the courts would never give him custody of his children. They probably wouldn’t even allow him to see them again. Truth could be corrosive, a mercurial liquor. It could eat holes in the bulwarks of daily life, destroying entire edifices.

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What I like best about this novel is how each of the five friends is introduced to the reader. We get the story of how that friend met the main character and then we get an entire chapter on that friend's backstory. This method helps the reader form a solid image of each character in the mind's eye.

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‘Now let’s be super quiet. The hardest part is over. We can do this.’

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Nalan placed the key in the ignition, giving it a gentle twist. The engine came to life and, a second later, music blared out. Whitney Houston poured into the night, asking where do broken hearts go.

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‘Fuck!’ said Nalan.

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The ending is well done. It connects the main character’s early life to her death and forces a situation that she would have been very happy with.

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