“In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore.”

In May of this year, Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation into Elif Shafak’s novels, particularly The Gaze (1999) and Three Daughters of Eve (2016), for charges of obscenity and promoting child abuse. This was ironic considering the increasing instances of violence against women and children in the country which are overlooked. Instead of taking action, the authorities decided to launch a witch-hunt against writers who attempt to address these issues in their fiction.

This isn’t the first time Shafak has been in trouble with the law. In 2006, she was tried, and acquitted, of “insulting Turkishness” when she referred to the slaughter of Armenians during the First World War as a genocide in The Bastard of Istanbul. She remains undaunted though, as proven by the subject matter of her latest Booker Prize 2019 shortlisted novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.

Shafak considered storytelling akin to “swimming against the tide of the the times” in a recent interview. For her, “Fiction is, and has always been, a manifestation of calm resistance.” She liked that “combination of peacefulness and rebelliousness, side by side.” In my own reading experience of her writing over the years, she gives a voice to the marginalized and shines a light on those deemed invisible.

10 Minutes begins with the death of Leila, dubbed Tequila Leila at the brothel where she works, at the hands of unknown assailants. It seems to be another mindless casualty in a string of violent attacks against sex workers in the city. And while her heart might have stopped, her brain keeps working for longer – 10 minutes and 38 seconds to be exact. In these limited moments before her mind shuts down completely, she looks back at the colourful motley life she has led, from a blessed birth to a cruel death.

Divided into two major sections, the first one is from Leila’s perspective counting down till she is fully gone. Each minute after her death heralds the arrival of a sensuous memory from her past. The sense of smell and taste, the recollection of food, becomes a trigger for these flashbacks which are spaced over the entirety of her life, ranging from her childhood in Van to her adolescence and adulthood in Istanbul after she ran away from home. Also introduced are her five friends who become her new family. The story is played out mostly in the city, which becomes a character it itself.

When Christopher Morley wrote in Where The Blue Begins (1922): “All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim,” he probably did not have Istanbul in mind. Yet, it is a description which fits it perfectly – dangling the hope of fulfillment only to take it away, home to both light and darkness. In Shafak’s writing, it is a city of contradictions, of sharp-edged dreams and despair-ringed hopes. For her, the idea of a single Istanbul is mere illusion. It is a surreal she-city of strange ways that shapes, and in turn is shaped by, its inhabitants continuously.

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“There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive … All these Istanbuls lived and breathed inside one another, like matryoshka dolls that had come to life.”

Istanbul and the diverse array of its denizens becomes the site for the playing out of Shafak’s personal politics. She addresses a gamut of issues throughout the novel, ranging from pre-adolescent sexual abuse, trans experiences, prostitution, patriarchy, violence, student movements and authoritarianism. Through the character of Leila, unapologetic for the decisions she has made in life, she posits the image of a different kind of female liberation and independence. While dismantling the notion of family honour and shame, she also highlights the hypocrisies that plague us as a species in a cogent manner.

At times it gets too on the nose though, and detracts from organic storytelling. There are many places where the narrative gets preachy and sentimental, and distance between the writer and the narrator just paper-thin. It distorts the book’s overall tone, underplaying its expected impact in these places. Shafak has simply tried to tackle too many concerns. They get limited attention, making it almost mechanical – like a checklist off of which issues are being crossed out, one after the other.

Another big drawback is the inherent structuring of the novel. It is Tequila Leila who makes everything come alive, even as she moves closer to death, so inevitably the narrative suffers when the viewpoint changes in the second half of the book, which looks at the aftermath of her death from the perspective of her friends. As it is the glimpses we get of Leila through the flashbacks are fleeting and brief, constructing a patchwork life. The sudden shift midway, jarringly out of place at first, doesn’t help matters. I am sure Shafak had her reasons for this shift and it would work for a lot of readers, but for me, it did not blend with the first part to make the book a seamless whole.

The reason behind this inconsistency has mainly to do with the new narrators in my opinion. Her friends are just character types, created by the broadest of brush strokes, and do not feel fleshed-out. Their introductions in the first section are perfunctory, done on a need-to-know basis, which makes it hard to connect with them later on. Plus, their portrayal occasionally even devolves into cliché. The book would have been stronger had it ended with the countdown with all the other action involving the friends alternated with Leila’s narration throughout instead of coming after it.

Preceding criticism aside, 10 Minutes is a powerful, important book with glittering, evocative prose which reinforces Shafak’s position among the leading writers of today. At its core, the book is about how sometimes social ties which we form ourselves are/become more important than blood ties. It is an incredible celebration of outcasts and misfits who cling to the edge of mainstream society. Leila is able to find a new family of friends, a water family, after being rejected by her actual family. She manages to carve out a space for herself, in spite of all the hardships she is forced to face, and we get an indelible portrait of a woman’s life lived on her own terms. The circumstances and impact of her death reverberate throughout the book with Shafak driving home the point that short lives cast long shadows and no one is inconsequential.

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