For Turkish fiction, besides The Time Regulation Institute, Penguin Classics has also published

• Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a fur coat (serialised 1940-41, first edition 1943)
  in a translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe (2016),
  with an introduction by David Selim Sayers.

The teacher Sabahattin Ali (1907–48) (wiki; fuller Turkish version), a protégé of the Sertels and Nazım Hikmet (see The struggle for Turkey), contributed to literary magazines, going on to found and edit the satirical weekly Marko Paşa. Perceived as a dissident author critical of Atatürk and the Republican state, he spent periods in prison. In 1948, while seeking a new life abroad free of state intrusion, he was murdered at the Bulgarian border, apparently at the behest of the Turkish National Security Service.

Sabahattin Ali (left) with Nazım Hikmet. Source.

In Turkey, as Sayers comments, Ali is “a figure of gravitas […], a devastatingly incisive observer who harnessed the power of his prose to expose the country’s social and political injustices”. Writing in 2016, Maureen Freely explains Ali’s enduring relevance:

The fate of Marko Pasha, his satirical weekly, calls to mind the almost 2,000 prosecutions by President Erdoğan’s of those who have dared to mock him. Ali’s murder, allegedly at the hands of an offended patriot, was echoed by the 2007 murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. It also calls to mind the foiled shooting of the main opposition newspaper’s editor, Can Dündar, as he walked with his wife into court to receive a five-year sentence for publishing an article about the ruling party’s involvement in the secret arming of jihadi groups in Syria. This was only a few weeks ago. And it was just the latest episode in a series of increasingly savage attacks on independent publishing and journalism. The suppression of critical voices is now as harsh, if not harsher, than it was during the fascist-dominated single party state that crushed Ali and so many others. When Ali’s readers cry for him, they are also crying for themselves.

By contrast, Madonna in a fur coat is the semi-autobiographical story of a doomed liaison, set largely in Berlin, where Ali himself studied from 1928 to 1930 before returning to Turkey to teach. The protagonist Raif is a “rather ordinary” man “with no distinguishing features, no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a single day”. As this article explains, by the 1970s interest in Ali grew as he began to be considered as a forgotten author coming to light, now distanced from his ideological identity and turned into a “mystical and romantic” figure adopted by both left and right. And the novel’s recent popularity in Turkey is attributable to its promotion by publishing houses amidst changing copyright laws alongside the power of social media, as well as reassessed images of the author himself. But as Freely observes, while Ali’s admirers have regarded the novel as a “puzzling aberration”, a mere love story,

his least acclaimed novel has become Turkey’s most celebrated love story today because it refuses the traditional gender roles that Turkey’s president seems hell-bent on enforcing, not just in the religious heartlands but also in the cities and towns that have been secularising, and liberalising, for almost a century. Anyone who departs from his retrograde norms, he decries as traitors or terrorists in the making. During last year’s election campaign, he went so far as to accuse Turkey’s LGBT community as being in league with Armenians, Kurds, and the hostile foreign powers that funded them. Hardly a day passes without his saying what a woman should be, and what a man—a real man—should do to keep her in her place.

Source.

Sayers too makes a determined case for Madonna in a fur coat. While apparently apolitical, the novel subtly critiques the Republican dream. Raif falls in love with Maria ” in the most Ottoman way imaginable, by looking at her picture rather than her person”. As their intense, complex platonic relationship unfolds amidst the decadence of Berlin nightclub life, Maria laments:

Do you know why I hate you? You and every other man in the world? Because you ask so much of us, as if it were your natural right… Mark my words, for it can happen without a single word being uttered… it’s how men look at us and smile at us. It’s how they raise their hands. To put it simply, it’s how they treat us… you’d have to be blind not to see how much confidence they have, and how stupidly they achieve it. […] And our duties? To bow down and obey, and to give them whatever they want….

Such a “refreshingly unorthodox dissection of gender” lies “firmly outside the norms of Western and Turkish society alike, whether in the 20s, the 40s, or today”. Still, while lacking a background in Turkish culture and politics, I tend to side with those who prefer to value Sabahattin Ali for his more avowedly political writings.

For two other Madonnas of whom you may have heard, click here and here.