He learns German from an army officer and lives in a pension that houses a colourful mixture of international guests.

Yet he is more interested in the German language and culture than his work in the factory. Raif's father sends him to Berlin in the early 1920s to learn the trade of soap manufacturing. 'Beautiful and forceful portrait of unrequited love': cover of a 1943 Turkish edition of 'Kürk Mantolu Madonna' Shortly before Raif dies, the book ends up in the hands of the narrator, who reads it during a single night. It contains the notes he took ten years previously about his life in Berlin. At some point the narrator gets behind Raif's secret, hidden inside a black school exercise book in his desk.

He is surrounded and tyrannised by a large family, which he cares for with great self-sacrifice. He visits him at home, as Raif is often sick.Īt home too, Raif lives in crowded conditions without a chance of creativity. He – the narrator of the background story – gets to know Raif and develops an interest in the clever and educated but extremely tight-lipped character. One day a young man is made his assistant at the bank. Raif Efendi works as a translator in an Ankara bank in the early 1940s. With great narrative sleight of hand, Ali takes the reader step by step back to 1920s Berlin, where Raif, a twenty-four-year-old Turkish man, meets the love of his life.Īs we trace the young Raif's time in Berlin, we already know about this remarkable man's later life and death. Raif's meeting with Maria, the 'Madonna in a fur coat' of the title, and the relationship that develops between them, has all the criteria of a classic love story, yet never appears old-fashioned or kitsch. Seldom has a modern novel given us a more beautiful and forceful portrait of unrequited love than Sabahattin Ali's Kürk Mantolu Madonna, published in Turkey in 1943. Hoffmann, friend of Aziz Nesin: Turkish novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist Sabahattin Ali

Kurk mantolu