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Pleased to see this made the Booker Prize 2019 longlist!Elif Shafak is a bestselling novelist known for her stories of strong female characters, immigrants and minorities. She follows this trend in her latest novel '10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World' depicting a story of Leila. Leila, known as Tequila Leila, is a prostitute in Istanbul who is killed at the start of the book and her body ends up in a rubbish dump. After being physically dead, Leila's brain remains active for another...
Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 This riveting tale has two protagonists: The women of Turkey and the city of Istanbul. Right at the beginning, we meet Leila, a prostitute who was attacked and then left to die in a metal rubbish bin on the outskirts of the city. The title-giving 10 minutes and 38 seconds are the time span in which her brain slowly shuts down, one last time re-collecting her life in numerous flashbacks - these vignettes make up the first half of the novel (and in the con...
An extraordinary novel: tender, sensual, compassionate, inclusive and steeped in atmosphere and detail, this is a love letter to Istanbul, to tolerance, to friendship. Read it now.
Not as good as Daughters of Eve. But the life of Laila Tequila is beautifully told, as usual.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is all that remains in the life of Tequila Leila, a sex worker who has been murdered, her body unceremoniously dumped in a wheelie bin in Istanbul. As her brain shuts down, Leila recalls her life in its entirety. These recollections – covering one woman’s life from birth to death, the family who disowned her and the friends who came to be her greatest support, against a backdrop of key moments in Turkish history – form Part One: The Mind. In Part T
”Istanbul was not a city of opportunity but a city of scarsIstanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong.Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters”The book gives a birds-eye view of the outcasts of Istanbul’s society but it almost felt as if the author was using a checklist. We have a disgraced prostitute, a revolutionary, a dwarf, a transvestite, a singer, an illegal immigrant…... They felt as if they were there to represent a specific socio-economic issu...
This was... not good...
The human brain has been found to remain active up to 10 minutes 38 seconds after death. This scientific fact, as also mentioned in the book, acts as the premise of the story of 'Tequila Leila', and her friends. Tequila Leila, as she is known amongst her peers and customers, is a prostitute in her forties, lying in an alley in Istanbul, her body murdered, her mind racing through her memories in its last minutes left on the earth. Things from the deepest corners of her memory come back to her cle...
I finished this book a few days ago....( haven’t read any reviews yet)....and it’s unusual for me to wait 3 days before writing a review. Have you ever felt you have so much to say - you don’t know whet to begin? Ha...perhaps there’s a club for people like us? It’s a fantastic discussion book!!!Well, I’m on vacation - aware of holiday-distractions - but this is a book I’d personally love to engage with others to discuss. Perhaps if I bang my head against the wall - the right words at the right t...
If you read the synopsis of the plot, you may think it sounds strange and rather unappealing ... While reading the novel, you will feel emotionally exhausted and at the same time you will recall what friendship means, the friendship Leila was continually offered even after her brain shut down completely and her soul left her body.Leyla, her group of friends and Istanbul and the main protagonists, and the worlds are of different nature, the individualism versus the strict rules imposed by the soc...
LONGLISTED (and hopefully shortlisted) FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE.Leila knows she is dead. Not from the fact that her body is lying in a waste bin, but from the facts that her heart is no longer beating, and her breathing has stopped. Her brain however is still, “brimming with life”.In life Leila had been a prostitute. Tequila Leila was the name she had given herself. She was well known to the authorities and knew that they would have no trouble identifying her body once the sun came up and it wa...
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize after having been re read following its longlisting - my final comment proving prescient - and with additional comments added.The book takes its cue from research that shows (as a medical examiner in the book reflects during an autopsy) which “observed persistent brain activity in people who had died …. for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.”The subject of the autopsy is Leyla Akarsu, a mid-40s (albeit claiming to be ten years younger) Pera...
This book has such moments of pure genius and honesty, and at times my heart felt so unbelievably full... However it also descended into somewhat of a farcical comedy during the course of Part Two so my feelings are very mixed. The premise is utterly fascinating and is based on observations from a research paper published in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences (link here) that found an instance of brain wave activity in a person declared clinically dead for 10 minutes 38 seconds post-d...
A giant note of gratitude to Collin and Nat K. for their phenomenal reviews of this book. How could anyone not want to read this after reading their thoughts?Elif Shafak shares that researchers have observed brain activity in those who just died. Some last as long as 10 minutes and 38 seconds. What happens in this span of time? Tequila Leila connects her memories, as she lies dying in a dumpster, with scents. Her sense of smell, still present, floods her with memories of self and those of her fi...
