10 minutes and 38 seconds is estimated as the time it takes for a dying brain to shut down. The scientific basis for that estimate is neither here nor there. Shafak uses this as a starting point to explore the dying moments of sex worker “Tequila Leila”, whose body has been dumped in a bin on the outskirts of Istanbul. As her brain begins to shut down, Leila tells her life story in the ten minutes and thirty eight seconds she has left of consciousness.
She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she had believed to be lost for ever. Time became fluid, a free flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable.
Here memories focus on the people who were important in her life. Along the way we find out how she became a sex-worker, coming from a rural, conservative Turkish family life where independent behaviour by women was severely curtailed, to live in the red-light district of Istanbul where she has a freedom, of sorts, and is able to develop a number of relationships and friendships. As the minutes of Leila’s life tick down we slowly learn more about her life, its tragedies and moments of joy. It’s a touching portrait of a difficult life where Leila’s ebullience manages to somehow overcome all that life can throw at her – until her brutal murder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The second half of the novel has a very different tone and structure. Leila’s disparate group of friends who we have been introduced to in the first half – 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 – come together to rescue Leila’s body from the horrible cemetery were it has been effectively dumped, a place for only the poorest and most marginal members of society (a real location – as with most of the novel the places and events referred to are all real). They dig up her body and take it across Istanbul to be buried with proper respect. This part of the novel has a totally different feel to the first half – there’s almost a ‘mad-cap’ adventure aspect to the way the grave-robbing takes place with little planning or discussion of the risks.
This novel is a thought-provoking consideration of gender issues in modern Turkey. It comes as no surprise to read that Shafak has been investigated by Turkish prosecutors for addressing child abuse and sexual violence in her fiction writing, nor that she has moved to the UK recently in order to avoid this potential censorship. On that initial point, I’m not usually a great fan of trigger warnings, but if ever a novel needed a TW flag it’s ’10 minutes and 38 seconds‘. Early on it contains a description of child sexual abuse which plays an important part in the narrative structure of the novel, but which I found hard to read. This novel was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and Shafak’s most recent novel The Island of Missing Trees is doing very well and has been shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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The Reading Bug 