10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Starred review from October 7, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize, this audacious, inventive novel by Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve) begins with the death of its protagonist and moves onward from there. An Istanbul prostitute known as “Tequila Leila” is murdered and her body thrown into a dumpster. Though her heart stops beating, her brain continues to function for the 10 minutes and 38 seconds of the title, as she is jolted back to the settings of her most graphic memories. Leila, it turns out, grew up in a rural Turkish town, where she was separated from her mother in infancy. Sexually abused by her uncle and threatened with an arranged marriage, teenage Leila took off to Istanbul, where the only work she could find was in the sex trade. Leila is a lively character, and her life, particularly in Istanbul, isn’t unrelentingly bleak. The narrative opens up in surprising ways when Leila’s five best friends, all outcasts like herself whose pasts are detailed in the book, decide to rescue her body from the “Cemetery of the Companionless,” where it has been unceremoniously buried. This is a vividly realized and complicated portrait of a woman making a life for herself in grueling circumstances, and of the labyrinthine city in which she does so.

November 1, 2019
In a novel circling a murdered woman's last moments as she recalls key incidents from her life, Shafak (The Three Daughters of Eve, 2017, etc.) highlights Turkish society's treatment of women and outsiders. Tequila Leila, a middle-aged sex worker, lingers at the border between life and death inside a metal garbage can on the fringes of Istanbul--to which Turkish-born Shafak has written a highly ambivalent love letter; lyrical prose embraces the sensual, sordid, and corrupt city she no longer visits for political reasons. Speaking of sensual, Leila's final minutes are structured around remembered tastes, from the salt on her skin as a newborn to the single malt whiskey sipped with her last customer before recklessly getting into a car with strangers. The flavor of watermelon returns her to a childhood complicated by confusion over her birth mother's identity and irreparably damaged by an uncle's repeated sexual abuse beginning when she was 6 in 1953. In 1963 Leila faced an arranged marriage while mourning her younger brother's death, events associated with goat stew. Instead she ran 1,000 miles away from her hometown to Istanbul and was quickly trapped into prostitution. More taste memories follow her life as a sex worker as well as her happy marriage to a leftist artist, cut short by his death during a protest march. Tastes also represent the five friends central to Leila's life and their individual stories of being mistreated, victimized, and/or made to feel invisible. Sexual abuse, political corruption, and religious fundamentalists' intolerance have been the tropes in so many Shafak novels that her outrage here, however heartfelt, feels shopworn. And her plotting can be overwrought. Yet Shafak's ability to create empathy for her cast of sex workers and social outcasts can be irresistible, especially when a character is allowed more complexity, like Leila's oldest friend, Sinan, who hid his love for Leila until her death. An uneven mix of charm, melodrama, polemics, and cliché that doesn't represent the prolific Shafak at her best.

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Starred review from October 15, 2019
Leila cannot believe that she's been murdered and dumped in a trash bin on the shadowy edge of Istanbul. Ever-courageous Turkish writer Shafak (Three Daughters of Eve, 2017) creates another resilient woman protagonist at odds with Turkey's repressive society in this Man Booker shortlist title, though, in irrepressible Leila, Shafak raises her literary dissent to a new level. The first half of this seductively imaginative, rambunctiously humorous, complexly tragic, and lyrically redemptive tale presents Leila's tough life in enrapturing and enraging flashbacks as her brain lights up with a final 10-minute-and-38-second surge of memories, from the cruel betrayal of her mother, a tyrannized second wife, to the sexual abuse that finally induces Leila to run away to Istanbul, where she finds some safety and love in a brothel. Leila also remembers her five beloved friends?Sinan, her childhood ally; Nalan, a trans woman; Jameelah, a trafficked Somalian; Zaynab, a dwarf and fortune-teller; and Humeyra, a singer who fled domestic violence. This band of squabbling, traumatized, loyal, witty, and heroic outcasts carry the story forward as they seek Leila's grave in the grim Cemetery of the Companionless. Shafak's motley and compassionate cast embodies both the brutal consequences of tyranny and the power of individuals to undermine it in a full-tilt novel set in a fabled city, a swirling microcosm of human complexity and paradox.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)