Madonna in a Fur Coat

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I cannot reveal more - only that the love story is written in a note book by Raif and exposed by chance to our narrator, a young man who works in the same office. The note book passes into our narrator's hands for just one night and at the request of Raif it must be burnt. The framing story allows us to feel the authenticity of Raif's character - he has allowed not one person close to him in his entire life except Maria - and there are consequences. However, two barriers stand in his way to getting closer to this alluring woman’s flame. On the one hand, she pegs him as almost a virtual woman she can feel safe to befriend. On the other hand, she sets quite a serious boundary for him: Kendiniz için yıllar sonrasına zaman kapsülü niteliğinde bir mektup bıraktınız mı? Bilinmeyen bir kadın ya da bilinmeyen bir adam olabildiniz mi? Asıl değerin, bilinen ve alışılmış doluluklarda değil, bilinmeyen ve tarif edilemeyen boşluklarda olduğunu anlayabildiniz mi? Ali’s own story as a dissident, freethinking romantic jailed for his beliefs may be a factor in the book’s current popularity—it must be hard to disentangle these things—but it could just also be the appeal of the story itself. Innocence, sexuality and social resistance combine in a story of two young people who are not just refusing to accept gender and other socially-imposed roles, but who are also finding themselves in each other. Maria decries the dominance that she claims comes with hetereosexual love, yet she longs for it. Raif is trying hard to grow up. There is a great deal of introspection; both monologue and dialogue is much peppered with ellipses rendering it rather breathless.

When misfortune visits those who once walked alongside us, we do tend to feel relief, almost as if we believe we ourselves have been spared, and as we come to convince ourselves that they are suffering in our stead, we feel for these wretched creatures. We feel merciful.O aşağı bakış yok mu o aşağı bakış. Ah, Raif! Seni anlıyorum. Anlamaz mıyım hiç? Belki o kadın yukarıya ya da sana doğru baksaydı sen o kadınla hiç ilgilenmeyecektin. Ama o kadının aşağı doğru bakması yok mu... O aşağı ki neler olmuyor o yeryüzünde. Her gün bombalar atılıyor, çocuklar ve masumlar ölüyor o aşağıya bakılan yerde. Boşluklar her gün bombalarla, ölümlerle, yalanlarla dolduruluyor. Belki de bu ilk bakış sana bu kadar şeyi düşündürdü. Neden olmasın? Hayatla savaşı olan bir insanı tanımak istedin diye suçlu mu oldun yani? She has decided that she is not to be pushed around: any relationship is to be strictly on her conditions which, while extremely close, are decidedly platonic. I understand this profoundly because I lost a beloved dog due to poisoning - ha some might say - a dog? Yes, but he loved me more than I loved him, because at the end of the day I refused to take him home with me - where he wanted to die. I insisted on him staying with the vets in the hope he might recover. He died just a short time after I left him for the last time. He raised his head to look at me with daydreaming eyes, whereupon I said, "You must be Raif Efendi." Finally available in English, this 1943 Turkish classic from a journalist twice imprisoned for his political views limns the emotionally wrought relationship between a reserved young Turkish man and an unconventional woman artist in interwar Berlin…Ali’s affecting story of love and loss is both timeless and grounded in its distinctive setting, with sometimes old-fashioned charm that will appeal to many readers.”— Library Journal

Sabahattin Ali's heartbreaking novel Madonna in a Fur Coatspins a beguiling love story…. With perceptiveness and compassion, Ali depicts the sexual politics of the time and the heady tension between his male and female characters. "Why is it that even in the way you beg, there is dominance, and pity in the way we refuse?" Maria asks Raif in what becomes a powerful monologue on female empowerment. In equal measure, Ali explores preconceptions of masculinity through Raif's vulnerability and his capacity for intimacy. Relationships are endangered, he shows, by misunderstanding and misjudgment more than malice…. English translation conveys the author's emotional intelligence and crisp lyricism. Its sad tinge of fatalism belies its deeper, more dynamic aspects. Love both tortures and redeems the soul. …a compelling and tragic love story between a Turkish man and German woman.”— Shelf Awareness(starred) Come and see me tomorrow morning!" he said now. "We'll see if we can figure something out for you. You have a good brain in that head of yours. You were always pretty lazy, too, but that's not important. Experience is the best teacher! ... Don't forget now. Get there early."

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Sabahattin Ali (February 25, 1907 – April 2, 1948) was a Turkish novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist.

ve tekrar itiraf etmeliyim ki kötü bir yorum yapmak için son sayfalar�� bekliyordum zırtlanlar gibi. A poignant coming-of-age tale, drenched in disillusionment. The gap between hope and reality, art and ordinary life, has been explored in many other novels, but rarely with the unaffected simplicity of Madonna in a Fur Coat ...The translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe is crisp, capturing Ali’s directness and clarity of language.”— Times Literary Supplement The fictional Maria Pruder is half-Jewish. This is not dwelled upon, but it cannot be entirely anachronistic, knowing what we now know and what Ali, writing in the early 1940s, must also have known, to perceive a lingering shadow. Here, as elsewhere, there are only the most tenuous hints at politics, but one cannot help think that Ali might, as he wrote the tragic ending of Madonna, have wondered what happened to the real-life Maria under the Nazis. Again, I laughed. Whereupon he said, "You really have to stop, my friend!" and went on to lecture me about how, if I wanted to be successful, I had to start being practical, and how empty pursuits like literature could do nothing but harm once your schooldays were behind you. He spoke to me as if I were a child, never considering that I might have something to say, indeed to argue, in response, and he did not shy away from making it clear that it was success that had given him his courage. Meanwhile I just sat there, hiding behind a smile that I was sure must look very foolish and only served to add to his confidence.When Rafe gets seriously ill, he entrusts a journal from his youth to his new friend, our narrator. His story begins when his academic ambitions in poetry are curtailed by a family mission to Berlin where he is tasked to learn the business of perfumed soaps as a strategy to expand their olive oil business. His rich romantic fantasy life inspired by literature clashes with his social awkwardness in talking or interacting with women. Even I can empathize with his ineptness: This emotional Turkish classic reminds us to always treasure those we hold dear….poignant…. Sabahattin Ali tells a passionate tale of emotional isolation, newfound intimacy, and the gut-wrenching intensity of love and loss. Ali expertly weaves a tragic story of loneliness, love, and grief, giving us a glimpse of spiritual isolation. Readers are pulled into the monotonous and lonely life of Raif Efendi, where they are sure to experience his acute alienation, his happiness upon finding a person who understands him so completely, and the pain and resentment caused by an ironic misunderstanding. This classic tale causes us to examine what our own lives would be like without the people we cherish .” —Washington Independent Review of Books At the outset of the novel, the narrator is unemployed and beginning to isolate himself from everyone around him as a result of his joblessness. An old classmate of the narrator’s, named Hamdi, offers the narrator a job that the narrator accepts despite his misgivings about the work and about Hamdi’s condescending attitude. The narrator begins his new job and shares an office with a man named Raif Efendi who has worked at the firm for several years without advancing. Although everyone treats Raif with disrespect, the narrator becomes intrigued by him and seeks to get to know Raif better. During one of Raif’s frequent bouts of illness, the narrator visits him at his home and sees how little affection and respect is shown to Raif by his family. Raif asks the narrator to collect his things from his desk. The narrator discovers a notebook in Raif’s desk that Raif asks the narrator to burn. The narrator pleads with Raif to allow him to read the contents of the notebook before he destroys it. Raif agrees. Maria soon regains her strength, but Raif finds out that his father died and decides he needs to leave for Havran. Maria too decides to leave Berlin to live with her mother in Prague, until Raif settles in Turkey and invites her to live with him. When he finally reaches Turkey, he sees that his brother-in-laws have claimed a big portion of the inheritance. He is given a "wasteland" to farm. While he works in his olive fields, his only source of joy is Maria's letters, until one day the letters stop coming. In one of her last letters, Maria says she has got a surprise that she will reveal when they see each other face to face. When she stops sending letters, Raif thinks Maria too has betrayed him and is heartbroken. He has lost his will to live, and eventually marries a woman that she doesn't like, and lives with her in between the furniture he bought for Maria. He thinks that if even his Maria was going to betray him, then not another person on this Earth is worth his trust and alienizes himself from the society. Raif finds a job as a German translator in a lumber firm.

Her father’s books, meanwhile, travelled on without impediment. During the cold war, they were translated into a number of languages in the Soviet bloc, and they are still much read in Bulgaria. There is even a statue of Ali in Ardino, the town of his birth. Ali was publicly taunted for failing to act like a 'real man'. He never responded to it. Instead, he wrote A] profound, moving meditation on love and loss…. ‘It is read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages, but most of all by young adults,’ writes Maureen Freely, who, with Alexander Dawe, has produced this stylish English translation now coming to the United States. ‘And no one seems able to explain why.... Though writing more than 70 years ago in a country where traditional sexual morality reigned, Ali casts his lovers’ relationship in strikingly modern terms.’” —Washington Post I could have carried on as I was, shunning human company and leading a mediocre existence, but at no point having to face how very empty my life was. I’d have dragged on through life, convinced that my strange temperament allowed me no more, and never would I have known what it meant to lead a happy life. I’d have suffered from loneliness, while still believing that one day I might be rescued. Such was my state of mind when Maria, or rather her painting, came into my life. She had swept me away from my dark and silent world, delivering me to the land of truth and light. And now she had vanished, offering no reasons, and as suddenly as she’d come. Men and women have such a hard time understanding what we want from each other, and our emotions are so foggy that we hardly know what we are doing. We get lost in the current. I don’t want that. If I have to do things that seem to me to be unnecessary and unsatisfying, I end up hating myself …But what I hate most is women always having to be passive.Kürk Mantolu Madonna, boşlukların ütopyasıdır. Boşlukların anlamını en güzel şekilde idrak edeceğiniz romanlardan birisidir. Raif Bey anlatıcı için, Maria Puder de Raif Bey için bir ütopyadır. Fakat aynı zamanda boşlukların distopyasıdır da diyebiliriz. Çünkü boşluklar bu ikilemde kaldıkları sürece anlamlı olan olgulardır zaten. O bilinmez boşluğun kapanıp kapanmayacağını bilmeden yaşamak, beynini ve ruhunu bitirmek harika bir distopya değil midir? Bu kalabalık hayatta, bu dolulukların kirlettiği hayatta, yüreğimizi ve ruhumuzu gereksiz şeylerle doldurmaya çabalayan yüzlerce olayın, nesnenin, insanın olduğu bu hayatta biraz da boşlukların olmasını arzulamak harika bir ütopya değil midir? müzisyen madonna ile kıyaslandığı bir gündem içerisindeyken bir his geldi bana, iki parçalık okuma serüveni ile bitirdim... I won’t spoil anything more about the evolution of this relationship, but I will share some aspects of her Maria’s character and attitudes. For example, she has a chip on her shoulder over the arrogance and presumption of men with regard to women, especially their angry responses when their advances are rejected: Very, very romantic, coming of age novel… for someone who likes a big epic [book]”—WNYC The Brian Lehrer Show Hoping to learn more, he dives into the exhibition catalogue, but only finds “Maria Puder, Selbsporträt”. A newspaper article on the exhibition compares the painting to Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna delle Arpie. He rushes off to buy a print—and only then it occurs to him that his Madonna, the one in the fur coat, must “exist in real life”.