Meike's Reviews > 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019
This riveting tale has two protagonists: The women of Turkey and the city of Istanbul. Right at the beginning, we meet Leila, a prostitute who was attacked and then left to die in a metal rubbish bin on the outskirts of the city. The title-giving 10 minutes and 38 seconds are the time span in which her brain slowly shuts down, one last time re-collecting her life in numerous flashbacks - these vignettes make up the first half of the novel (and in the context of the Booker are reminiscient of Mike McCormack's Solar Bones from 2017). Leila's memories are connected to the people she cherished most: D/Ali, an artist, communist activist and the love of her life, and her five best friends: Sinan, with whom she grew up; Nalan, a trans woman who ran away from her family in Anatolia; Jameelah, a victim of human trafficking from Somalia; Zaynab, a Lebanese refugee with severe health issues; and Humeyra who was born in Mesopotamia and fled an abusive marriage. Leila herself left the city of Van, where she was born in 1947, running away from sexual abuse and the threat of a forced marriage.

All of these characters end up in Istanbul, and their stories are entangled with Turkish history and the history of the city. Istanbul, melting pot and moloch, the "liquid city" where "everything was constantly shifting and dissolving", a city haunted by the past: "In Istanbul it was the living who were the temporary occupants, the unbidden guests, here today and gone tomorrow, and deep down everyone knew it." Shafak's novel touches upon topics like violence against women and minorites, patriarchal structures, religious indoctrination and oppression (but also religion as a source of strength), discrimination against queer and trans people, migration, social inequality, corruption, police brutality, and political turmoil like the violent protests against the Sixth Fleet in 1969 and the massacre on International Workers' Day in 1977. It is equally true that in 1990, when Leila is murdered, there was an increasing number of crimes against sex workers in Istanbul.

But this is also book about friendship and solidarity between people who are very different. In the second part of the novel, the five friends try to give Leila, who was not claimed by her family and thus brought to the Cemetery of the Companionless (a real place), a proper burial in order to honor their friend and to say good-bye: Leila might not have been what society expected of her, but she was loved. The short, final section, describes this unusual burial from the perspective of the corpse, and you will be surprised how beautiful it is.

At one point in the book, Leila describes her own memory as a graveyard, and it is astounding how Shafak manages to merge and mirror her human characters with the character that is Istanbul, the city of the dead, "a city prophesied to remain unconquered until the end of the world. For in the distance, the Bosphorus whirled, mixing saltwater with freshwater as easily as it mixed reality and dream."

A beautiful, moving book, that manages to talk about a specific subject, but also the human condition as such: "Istanbul was an illusion. (...) In truth, there was no Istanbul."