10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

It turns out 10 minutes 38 seconds is the span of time your brain continues to function after your heart stops beating. This is likely the timeframe in which your life ‘flashes before your eyes’, as is purported to happen when we die. When Tequila Leila’s heart stops, we are taken on a wild ride dissecting her ‘flashes’ as her sensuous memory recalls pertinent emotional moments of her life.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s 17th novel. Having read The Forty Rules of Love published in 2009, I know Shafak is a fearless writer who certainly doesn’t pull punches or hesitates to challenge the order of things in her home country of Turkey. That, along with the intriguing title, is why I hastened to pick up her latest.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World tells the story of Tequila Leila, an Istanbul prostitute. Each minute that passes is distinguished by a sense memory: the weight of the salt that her body was covered with at birth; the aromas of lemon, sugar and water that wafted from the kitchen of her childhood home; the taste of the cardamom coffee she drank during breaks at the brothel where she worked.

But more than just poignant emotional moments, we also learn who Leila was, and who and what had moulded the woman that she finally became. Her parents, siblings, the madam in the brothel where she worked, the love of her life and, perhaps most influentially, her five best friends.

These include Nalan, a trans woman; Humeyra, a runaway; Jameela, a young Somalian who was trafficked to Istanbul; Zaynab122, who has dwarfism; and Sinan, Leila’s soft-hearted childhood friend and the only male in the quintet. All outcasts struggling to find their place in Turkish society but who, in the end, are the five people who form Leila’s safety net – her ‘water family’ as it were – and who gave meaning to her life.

The first half of the book takes us deep into Leila’s consciousness, her character and life. When the last minutes and seconds run out and she dies, the second half of the book kicks into high gear with an action packed narrative of how the five friends set out to save their friend from being buried in the Cemetery of the Companionless and to give her the farewell she deserves.

There was much in this thoughtful novel that kept me pondering long after I put it down. It is a densely packed but well-paced read, filled with emotional honesty, interesting insights into the female psyche, and the societal values prevalent in the city of Istanbul (both then and now). As expected, Shafak’s political consciousness regarding gender, abuse and repression shines through and makes it an intriguing, thought-provoking read.