2025 Reading – Book 9

Book 9: Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali

At this point, I have forgotten who or what social media recommended this book to me. It was probably a GenZ trend, a poetry group where I am a lurker, or Reddit. Nevertheless, I went into this book the way you enter into gullies unintended; in the early days where there were no maps, of course. Knowing too much these days is killing our sense of whimsy, of mystery. But more on that later.

Some stories envelop you in their streets, in their naphthalene balls atmosphere, their cold and dark winters. Madonna in a Fur Coat is one of them. It is an unrequited love story about a Turkish man in the 1920s, who goes to Berlin to learn a trade, and falls hopelessly in love with a woman he sees in a painting and then meets in real life.

The novel starts in Turkey and is being narrated as story from the past, its echoes being heard in the present on the narrator’s death bed. A love story that stretches across decades with a wound that hasn’t healed; this novel is wrapped like a poem from a long time ago, still smelling of old musty doors and fragrances that linger in the doorway neither here nor there.

Most modern love is tightly coupled in reciprocity; it is not one-sided anymore, nor is it hopeless, and it is definitely not unsure. We have lost the unsure love to time, the star-crossed love as well. Although in this novel, Maria returns Raif’s love, it so happens that he has to return to Turkey after his father’s passing, and their love is lost to the future. It happens just like so much of human longing placed in the safe embrace of times yet to come. It might happen for us, we hope, and this hope is a sign that what is not yet received is not yet lost.

It might happen for us.

Except when Raif’s future arrives, he finds himself in a house full of immediate family, speaking a language from the past, and still waiting, while Death pauses for the wait to end.

The plot of Madonna in a Fur Coat is simple and while itself a short book, something is left to be desired. The absence of reconciliation, except for one scene, made it incomplete for me; although to be fair to the writer this incompleteness is a story on its own. I wonder how the book resurfaced from older shelves into newer ones given that the proclamation of love has changed so much.

On a recent girls’ trip, I heard (from a distance) many Atif Aslam ballads where he’s crooning for his beloved, and these bittersweet feelings seems to have been bottled up in the years gone by. This books feels much the same way. There is modern love, and there are love stories gone by; and the in-between is blurred into a cold, dark grey.

🌟 3/5