Madonna in a Fur Coat

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Raif is intensely in love with Maria, but he is not sure if she feels the same way, so he holds back. And it was just the latest episode in a series of increasingly savage attacks on independent publishing and journalism. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected.

A tale of young love and disenchantment, of missed opportunities and passion's elusive, flickering flame . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Alexander Dawe has translated several works from French and Turkish including the short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and Sait Faik.

In Turkey, meanwhile, Ali’s death continues to overshadow his life, in much the same way as his life overshadows his work – and with good reason. After serving as a teacher in Yozgat for one year, he earned a fellowship from the Ministry of National Education and studied in Germany from 1928 to 1930. I really loved this book and read it in a day, hurrying to get to the end to find out what happened to Raif and Maria.

The narrator has fallen on hard times, and it is only with the help of a crass and belittling former classmate that he is able to find work as a clerk at a firm trading in lumber.

There he finds a sick Maria, who is finally convinced that Raif is not like any other man and actually is in love with her. The story is told by a colleague who barely knows Raif, and that too adds a cold irony to the storytelling. When his friend reads it instead, he meets a younger Raif, sent to Berlin by his father to study the manufacture of soap. He moved from Ankara to Istanbul, to be drawn into the struggle against the fascists then dominating Turkey’s single party state.

His least acclaimed novel has become Turkey’s most celebrated love story today because it refuses the traditional gender roles that Turkey’s president seems hell-bent on enforcing, not just in the religious heartlands but also in the cities and towns that have been secularising, and liberalising, for almost a century.Mocked by shallow juniors at work and derided by many members of his family, he barely seems to exist. He is admired for the determination with which he defended his political beliefs, which are anchored through his writing. When he finally reaches Turkey, he sees that his brother-in-laws have claimed a big portion of the inheritance. Though he carried on working for state institutions, his dissident writings ultimately led to his being removed from his post in 1945.

The suppression of critical voices is now as harsh, if not harsher, than it was during the fascist-dominated single party state that crushed Ali and so many others. During last year’s election campaign, he went so far as to accuse Turkey’s LGBT community as being in league with Armenians, Kurds, and the hostile foreign powers that funded them.

Ali’s murder, allegedly at the hands of an offended patriot, was echoed by the 2007 murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It’s also a story about living in a prejudiced society which rewards certain egoistic behavioural patterns and humiliates the ones who do not conform to its norms and want to live according to their values of compassion, equality and kindness. He is so impressed by the woman in the portrait that after that day, he starts coming back to the exhibition until the painter, Maria Puder, introduces herself to Raif. The next day, the narrator goes to Raif's house to give back the notebook and talk, but Raif has died.