Doomed young love never fails to fascinate, which likely helps explain the belated success of MADONNA IN A FUR COAT, the long-forgotten 1943 novel by Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali. That Ali, a prominent critic and intellectual imprisoned for his political writings, was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1948 only adds to the novel’s allure. After decades of obscurity, the book recently became a surprise bestseller in its author’s native country, and is now available for the first time in English, translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe.

Ali’s leftist leanings may have led to his death, but his most famous work eschews explicit politics for romance. The novel tells the story of Raif Efendi, a diffident, thoughtful young man sent to Berlin by his father in the tumultuous years following World War I. In Germany, he is supposed to be learning about the soap-making business, but instead he spends his days wandering the city streets and stumbling in and out of galleries, coffeehouses and cabarets.

On a chance visit to an exhibition of modern art, Raif becomes entranced by a self-portrait of a young woman, whom he dubs the “Madonna in a fur coat.” Eventually, he meets the artist, Maria, and falls for her, swiftly and totally. “All my life, I’d kept my heart closed,” he says. “I had never known love. But now, all at once, the doors had flown open.”

"MADONNA IN A FUR COAT is a story of the power and the terror of young love. But it’s also an exploration of the complex internal life that exists beneath the self we present to the world."

Maria, for her part, feels that she and this awkward, shy man “would make excellent friends,” but she insists she’s not looking for romance. Ali offers few details on Maria’s past, but it’s clear she’s seen enough of the world and men to make her skittish and aloof. Raif interests her precisely because he doesn’t exhibit “that awful male pride.” She tells him in no uncertain terms that he shouldn’t expect her to feel anything but platonic affection for him.

Throughout their relationship, Maria fiercely defends her independence. Her impassioned speech on what now would be labeled male privilege feels just as pointed and necessary today as it must have seemed revolutionary nearly a century ago. “You’d have to be blind not to see how much confidence [men] have, and how stupidly they achieve it,” she tells the bewildered Raif the night they meet. “They are the hunters, you see, and we their miserable prey.” In a reversal of traditional gender roles, Maria is bold and fearless (though the violence of her mood swings suggest mental illness as well), while Raif is timid and romantic. “You should have been born a girl,” his father tells him as a child.

Raif is enchanted --- perhaps even obsessed --- with Maria, and over time, her reserve softens. But just as this unlikely pair seem on the verge of lasting happiness, life forces them apart. Raif returns to Turkey, finding work as a translator and retreating into himself, mourning his lost love. It’s this strange, distant man, who seems “to have no more life inside him than a plant,” who we meet at the novel’s beginning, seen through the eyes of his co-worker. It’s this nameless narrator to whom a dying Raif hands over a slim notebook containing the story of his youthful romance and disappointment.

MADONNA IN A FUR COAT is a story of the power and the terror of young love. But it’s also an exploration of the complex internal life that exists beneath the self we present to the world. “[W]hy do we assume it is the easiest thing in the world to know and judge each another?” wonders Raif’s co-worker, after he has begun to know his reclusive colleague. “Why…do we draw our final conclusions from our first encounters with people, and happily dismiss them?”

As the cover promises, there’s a touch of THE GREAT GATSBY’s tragic love story in MADONNA IN A FUR COAT, but there are also shades of Christopher Isherwood’s THE BERLIN STORIES in its outcast characters, as well as in the dinner table conversations about inflation and the ominous talk among boarding house residents of how Germany must “avenge the injustices of the past with another world war.” But Ali’s concern isn’t really the frayed and changing social fabric of the Weimar Republic --- he’s focused on the quiet desperation of Raif’s internal conflict, and the mysterious landscape of his heart. In this heartbreaking book, Ali confronts the rarity and power of making a true connection with another person, and reminds us how “beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone.”