CLASSIC: MADONNA IN A FUR COAT BY SABAHATTIN ALI

 STORYTELLING: 4/5 

WRITING STYLE: 3/5

THEMES/MESSAGE: 2/5

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: 2/5

IMPACT/ENGAGEMENT: 1/5

Total Grade: F (48%)

An F to end the year, something which has given me a greater hunger for the books awaiting me in 2026. A trending and popular book for the majority of 2025, Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali appeals to those looking for easily earned emotional sensation and quotable prose, both of which seem to satisfy the oh-so-misunderstood and self-indulgent readers of my generation. A bit harsh? Who cares! Let’s get into it…I guess…

So the book follows the life of Raif, a Turkish immigrant living in Germany, who arrives there in the hope of educating himself in the soap-making trade. He encounters an exceptional piece of art, which leads him to the artist, which leads him to an intense, momentary, and Byzantine relationship (pun intended, I hope you caught that one). His love interest, Maria, or, the Madonna in a fur coat, is an overthinker, a feeler, an artist, and a breath of freedom and originality which Raif confides in and loves. She is a sort of mystery to him, but one in which he can express everything about himself, and everything he has ever suppressed. SPOILERS AHEAD: the two, for a couple reasons, are separated with the intention to meet again soon, and to even spend the rest of their days together. Only that doesn’t happen. Ultimately, this stroke of misfortune proves to be the tragedy which fixes Raif’s outlook on life as well as himself. Apathy doesn’t even begin to describe the sort of attitude this man adopted. 

“All my life, I’d kept my heart closed. I had never known love. But now, all at once, the doors had flown open. My unspent passions had been released to illuminate this one magnificent woman,” (100). 

Storytelling and writing style were the stronger aspects of this book. While there is more telling than showing, what is being told is intricate and detailed explanations of the characters’ emotions, fears, apprehensions, desires and so on. Everything is right there at the surface so, as a reader, you don’t necessarily feel like you’re earning the information. It’s all handed to you on an ornate, silver platter. Ali did a good job of placing the reader in the setting, I will say, though there were times when I struggled with the time period but I think that was a problem personal to my own reading experience.  

A part of what I believe made this book so popular amongst readers my age is that a lot of the “revelations” Raif and Maria have felt fairly modern when it comes to language. They express themselves clearly, and there’s no beating around the bush when it comes to their feelings. They say how they feel. ALL. THE. TIME. 

One thing that surprised me about the structure of the book is that it’s actually a diary or journal entry set within a larger story, one narrated by Raif’s friend and coworker, whose name is lost on me, or perhaps never mentioned? Looking back, the symbolism which this outside character appears to represent is a second chance or opportunity for someone to avoid the same fate as Raif. Regardless, this narrator in question ends up walking away with much more of a lesson than I felt I did. 

“There were many kinds of love, just as there were many ways people could show their affection for one another. The name and the shape changed to fit the circumstances. In denying the love between a man and a woman its true name, we were deceiving ourselves,” (126). 

Around three quarters of the way through reading this book, I began to notice a few conflicts rising up in myself, one of which is as follows: Why do I relate to so much of what these characters are expressing while, simultaneously, hating these characters with such a serious and fervent passion? ANSWER (and it’s a long one): No, it’s not because I hate myself. My own personal self-hatred manifests itself in different ways, rest assured. But I do think I related to so much of what they said because it was all that stuff that everyone represses. It’s the hearing of it, the reading of it on the page in such an honest and blatant voice that makes these expressions feel so relatable. And I think my hatred of these characters, while a bit more complicated, has more to do with the fact that they express exactly what is generally left unsaid. A part of me wants to just cover their mouths with duct tape or hit them over the head for being so damn silly. We don’t need to express every damn feeling under the sun at all times!

The characterization was good and then it got old. I wanted to observe the characters and come up with my own ideas about them, but I rarely got to do that. I was being smothered with all the information being told and not shown. I didn’t like either of the characters’ personalities. 

At the beginning, I had a lot of hope and empathy for Raif. He seemed to be similar to me in his romantic and idealistic outlook on life, all stemming from an overexposure to fanciful tales and sentimental novels from an early age. But his passivity toward life he exerts the moment things didn’t go his way repelled me immensely. Passivity, in most cases, really pisses me off, and maybe that’s a character flaw of mine, or maybe it’s just an annoying thing to observe in a protagonist. He had a chance to be changed for the better following his relationship with Maria, but rather he allowed his inability to quench the future he’d imagined for himself to destroy him. And it didn’t have to be that way! He just let life roll right over him. Boo-hoo! You didn’t get what you wanted! And now you’re going to be sad-sack for the rest of your life? Get a grip! You don’t always get what you want. Life’s a little dissatisfying. This is nothing new, and why am I, as a reader, expected to feel sorry for an individual who spends the majority of his life feeling sorry for himself and doing nothing to change it? Give me a break. 

Maria was hardly any better. I, too, am an overthinker who tends to overshare. But I think her theories are ones belonging to any self-deprecating pseudo-intellectual that hasn’t accepted the way of the world, or the inevitable dynamics between men and women, which is the same thing. She’s a contrarian at all costs and exasperating to hang out with (we all know someone like that). In fact, I want you to imagine that edgy girl you knew in middle school that donned accentuated winged eyeliner and was pretty enough to entice a few boys but, once in her apparatus of enchantment, her love interests would realize she had read too many books they’d never heard of and knew too many words they didn’t understand and was wildly uncomfortable with herself while also being obsessed with herself. Too niche of a description? Probably, but I don’t really care. A Class A manic pixie dream girl, filled with relatively modern feminist ideals, and willfully confused by the traditions and patterns of human beings, Maria was an obnoxious misanthrope, like Raif, who I felt next to nothing for. (P.S. I saw the ending a mile away). 

“Perhaps what I will write will not be nearly as painful as what I have lived and it will bring me some relief,” (50). 

There’s good writing in this, to be sure, but it just didn’t hit me the way I’d expected. And not to sound like a narcissist myself, but so many of the “epiphanies” these characters had (and there’s a lot of them) felt so base-level, (and by base-level I mean I’d realized half of these ideas and concepts by the time I was a freshman in high school). So, in one way, this could be a good book for high school students, but I don’t think I, as I am now, was the target audience for this book, despite what the algorithm says. And so, along with 2025, this book can kiss my ass on its way out. Cheerio and God bless!