‘Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World’ by Elif Shafak

I had read somewhere – as has this author, obviously- that the mind does not shut down immediately upon death. As the morgue technician inspecting the body of a woman found in a garbage bin observes:

When exactly did a living being turn into a corpse? As a young graduate fresh out of medical school, he had had a clear answer, but he wasn’t so sure these days….Researchers at various world renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order?…If that were true, shouldn’t human beings be considered semi-alive as long as the memories that shaped them were still rippling, still part of this world?

p.190,191

This, then, is the premise by which the first part of the book is organized. Ten minutes and thirty eight seconds, counted off chapter by chapter as Leila’s murdered body, stuffed into a rubbish bin, gradually shuts down. Minute by minute she remembers impressions, smells and senses that convey us through her life, not necessarily chronologically, as a young girl growing up in post-WW2 Turkey until her death in 1990. The opening chapter sees her slip as a baby from her mother’s body, into the arms of her father’s infertile first wife who claims the title of mother, relegating the second wife and birth mother to ‘auntie’. We see a child drawn into secrets – those of her own mother, and other more devastating secrets- that make her guilt-ridden and wary. When her father becomes increasingly religious, Leila rebels against him and ends up working in the brothels of Istanbul. It is this work that sees her violently murdered by religious zealots who cruise the streets of Istanbul, collecting angel figurines on the dashboard as they murder prostitutes in the name of ‘cleansing’ the streets. Along the way, Leila collects five friends – a childhood friend who always loved her, and four female friends, one of whom was trans-sexual- and these friends, and their stories, are numbered off in turn, with a chapter giving their own backstories.

All of this is embedded within the twentieth-century history of Turkey. In her birth city of Van, in east Turkey, the family lives in a house that had previously been owned by Armenians. The arrival of the Sixth Fleet of the U.S. Navy in 1968, the opening of the Bosphorus Bridge in 1973, the Taksin Square massacre of 1 May 1977 and the endemic corruption and string-pulling of the 1990s frame the story, sometimes a little too self-consciously. What did ring true was the increasing hardening of religious influence over daily life, giving a sharper sectarian edge to the already patriarchal and abusive treatment of women.

I loved the first part of this book, titled ‘The Mind’, and the creative (if somewhat ghoulish) device of counting down the minutes to her eventual shutdown. I was less enamoured of Parts II (The Body) and Part III (The Soul) which comprised the final third of the book. Here her friends rally around to take custodianship of her body, which had been consigned as to the bleak and distant Cemetery of the Companionless, in a form of paupers’ funeral. Leila was not companionless and her five friends embark on an attempt to remove her to a different cemetery. Unfortunately, this Keystone Kops farce detracted from the strong first 2/3 of the book although the final section, which is more evocative of Part I does rescue it somewhat. I had enjoyed Part I so much: perhaps I should have left it there.

My rating: 8/10 (would have been higher without Part II)

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. I think that I must have read a review of it somewhere.