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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The Applicant Synopsis
It's 2017 and Leyla, a leftwing Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin, is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel in order to stay afloat while awaiting a verdict on her visa status. Having failed her master's thesis and sued the German university over its decision, she is on the verge of losing her student visa and being forced to return to Istanbul, a city she thought she'd left behind for good.
As the clock winds down on her temporary visa, Leyla meets a right-wing Swedish tourist at a bar one night and-against her political convictions and better judgment-begins to fall in love. Will she choose to live a cookie-cutter life as the wife of a Volvo salesman, or just as unimaginable, return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, the ghost of her father still haunting their lives?
Written in wry, propulsive diary form and with probing self-reflection, Koca radically and courageously explores one's place in a deeply uncertain world, examining the bounds of state violence and self-destruction, of social dissociation and intense familial love. The Applicant is a stunning dissection of a liminal life lived between borders and identities.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781472158109 |
| Publication date: |
3rd August 2023 |
| Author: |
Nazli Koca |
| Publisher: |
Corsair an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
256 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Romance / Relationship Stories
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| Recommendations: |
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Nazli Koca Press Reviews
Written in journal-style entries, Koca's debut novel keeps its pace taut without ever seeming strained or frenetic. Leyla is a witty, acutely observant, and deeply sympathetic character who manages to tell the details of her life-both the transcendent epiphanies and the debauched aftermaths-with an honesty that disavows patronizing pity. This is a book about some of the largest issues of our time-ethnic identity, national belonging, the psychological traumas of patriarchy and White supremacy, sexual ownership, feminist reckoning-but it is also, and perhaps primarily, a book about the intimacy between a character and a reader as one agrees to talk and the other agrees to listen. A powerful debut that heralds a voice intent on being heard. - Kirkus, starred review
An important and radical new literary voice - Elif Batuman
A virtuosic, visceral meditation on borders, in-betweenness, and identity, and a testament to why we read in the first place: to laugh, to be devastated. With exhilarating and eviscerating wit, Nazli Koca is a daring and provocative prose stylist with heart - Patrick Cottrell, Author of SORRY TO DISRUPT THE PEACE
An exuberant debut from Nazli Koca, who has something to declare about both the boldness and the fear gripping the young navigating the cruel farce of our modern world - Manuel Munoz, author of THE CONSEQUENCES
Nazli Koca has the rare gift of making you laugh and weep within a page. Bold and original. - Sanae Lemoine, author of THE MARGOT AFFAIR
An exceptional novel - Joyelle McSweeney, author of TOXICON AND ARACHNE
