Dossier | Sabahattin Ali

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One of the people I came across has probably impressed me more than anyone else I’ve ever met.” That’s the starting sentence of the novel, where the author first tells the story of his friendship with “Raif Efendi” and then starts to read his diary, a black notebook, which Raif had entrusted to him on his deathbed. The first page of the diary is dated June 20, 1933. Raif’s father, a soap manufacturer in Turkey, sends him to Berlin for training.. Having no interest in soap manufacturing, being artistically inclined, Raif strolls through the town and in an exhibition hall he sees a self-portrait of a painter, namely Maria Puder, entitled “Madonna in A Fur Coat.” He is transfixed by the portrait and introduces himself to the painter when she visits the exhibition. They soon become lovers. Raif is called back to homeland due to the sudden death of his father. The Fur Coated Madonna Kürk Mantolu Madonna However, the war starts stranding Raif in Turkey and disrupting the correspondence of the two lovers. The distance apart and the lack of communication separates them completely. Ten years pass. Raif is married to a woman whom he does not love and has a job as an insignificant clerk.. He encounters an old acquaintance in Ankara, a German woman, who was a neighbor of the boarding house where he had stayed during his Berlin days and a distant relative of Maria Puder. Raif finds out from her that after his departure, Maria had given birth to a baby- their daughter- and then had died a week later. He is shocked and left with feelings of a life wasted, he is full of regrets. The book has done eight editions in Turkey in the last twelve months. (40,000 copies) ‘The Fur Coated Madonna’ is a love story. Passionate but clear, bounding to life but destined to death; full of hope yet ultimately a hopeless love story. There lies the secret to Sabahattin Ali's success: his ability to describe the emergence of a feeling, seemingly straightforward from the outside but swinging back and forth between opposite extremes at its core, revealing the tensions that accompanies such rises and falls. Attila Özkırımlı Sabahattin Ali while writing the novel ‘The Fur Coated Madonna’ used Maria Puder as his model as if she were his ideal woman. The woman in question is defined via her relationship with men. Maria is unable to tolerate being dominated by men. She’s not used to the traditional expectancy of women being reliant on men and obeying them. She’s a self-sufficient and independent woman. As Sabahattin Ali considered that to create such a Turkish female character would not have been realistic, he depicted Maria as a German. Nüket Esen German Russian French Turkish
Yusuf the Taciturn Kuyucaklı Yusuf Sabahattin Ali's most popular novel takes place in a small rural western Anatolian town near the Aegean Sea. A perfect description of the injustice of the ruling classes and dilemmas faced by a naive and pure human being are told via the tragic story of Yusuf, intermingled with great observations of nature. The novel is about the universal human tragedy of love, hatred, corruption, betrayal, murder and feelings of futility. The book has done seven editions in Turkey in the last twelve months. (35,000 copies) Sabahattin Ali's mastery becomes evident in his sorting out of the details and their arrangement. Historical and social events such as the declaration of the Constitution, the Balkan War, and mobilization are given, inasmuch as they impact the life style within a town. The description of the milieu is conscribed by the realities of the characters. The social structure becomes noticeable during the development stages of events. Atilla Özkırımlı Sabahttin Ali’s novels are few in number they are rich in quality. Both ‘Yusuf the Taciturn’ and ‘The Devil Within’ are among our most successful novels. The similarities of these two novels are as follows; both are Turkish novels unadulterated in terms of surroundings and in spirit; both concern traditional values. One of them describes the way of life and spirit of an Anatolian town, the other brings to life a small group of intellectuals. Vedat Günyol Sabahattin Ali was a realist at a time when it was the hardest period to speak of reality. The interest and influence he generated during his time, thirty or forty years later retains the same impact which is evidence of the timeliness of his life as a writer. Rauf Mutluay We could say that 'Yusuf the Taciturne,' was the first true example of an Anatolian novel. The opening sentence, "a rainy night in the Autumn of 1903, outlaws raided the village of Kuyucak, close to the Nazilli district of Aydın," specifies the period the book describes. Concluding in the district of Edremit and its surroundings, while telling a love story it also gives a good description of the social structure of a western Anatolian town opening up to development. The novel gives impressions of the places and surroundings where the writer grew up and exposes details of his life there. Olcay Önertoy I can’t help but ask myself if Sabahattin Ali were alive today would he have been able to find "the places he was seeking" or he would realised that words are not sufficient to change the world and he would have escaped like 'Yusuf the Taciturn.' Sulhi Dölek French: French: Turkish:
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