The Applicant

LoveReading Says

Exposing the instability of the world, and exploring universal longings for a place to call home through a deeply intimate, one-of-a-kind narrative voice, Nazli Koca’s The Applicant is an incredibly accomplished debut. Wry and raw, it shares the gripping story of a twenty-something left-wing Turkish writer who’s living on borrowed visa time in Berlin.

“Welcome to the bottom of the immigrant hierarchy.” So begins Leyla’s first day as a cleaner in an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel. In the process of appealing her German university’s decision to fail her master’s thesis, Leyla’s temporary visa is running out. If it does, she’d have to return to Istanbul, where her parents “lived through two military coups, six decades of political chaos, corruption, conflict.” 

Often engagingly blunt, Leyla’s voice is also speckled with straight-talking beauty: “Women’s pain lies beneath the territories of countries, of languages we speak. Our pain is an underland of its own, raising us all together in its womb. A cruel mother who then separates us, pits us against each other.”

Koca also brilliantly encapsulates why Berlin has long attracted the displaced — artist outsiders and immigrants — as she conjures the city in all its heady grittiness. In Leyla’s crisp words: “I was so intoxicated by Berlin that I didn’t even smell the puke, the piss, the poverty. Punks smoking and fighting, drunk, seemed like real-life Renaissance paintings of biblical miracles to me.” At the same time, we feel Leyla’s deep family obligations, and her fears, above all how she feels “afraid of being normal.” 

Into this, as Leyla writes the diary that constitutes this novel, and listens to Nina Simone, riffing "I’ve got words but I don’t have freedom”, she finds herself falling for a right-wing Swedish tourist after a one-night stand. After several visits to Sweden, after much soul-searching, she resolves to “not stage another coup against myself, another escape.” Put simply, Leyla’s story had me utterly in its thrall, and rooting for her to find her way in an often-unkind world.

Joanne Owen

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