THE APPLICANT, by Nazli Koca
About halfway through Nazli Koca’s debut novel, “The Applicant,” the narrator, 26-year-old Leyla, finally reads “My Brilliant Friend.” She’d found a copy of the book two months earlier, during a shift at the Berlin hostel where she works as a cleaner, but her attempts at starting it had failed; the fictional childhoods of Elena Ferrante’s characters Lila and Elena reminded Leyla too much of her own unhappy childhood in Turkey.
This time, at the urging of her friend Eve, a former online film magazine editor turned Instagram influencer, Leyla skips the book’s first 70 pages and starts reading at the point where Lila and Elena become teenagers. She finds that their working-class Neapolitan neighborhood “feels like home.” Like Lila and Elena, like Eve — like women everywhere stuck between their desires, their ambitions and the forces pulling those things in opposite directions — Leyla is conflicted. “Can Ferrante show me the way out of this paralysis, self-censorship, self-sabotage?” she wonders. No, of course. But can Leyla find the way out herself?
“The Applicant” takes the form of Leyla’s diary. It spans a little more than 10 months, starting on her first day at the hostel. She has finished but not graduated from a master’s program — her thesis was failed by an adviser known for never failing anyone — and her student visa has been terminated. Having sued her university over the adviser’s decision, she is awaiting the court’s verdict on her case and remains trapped in a liminal legal category with a temporary visa called a Fiktionsbescheinigung — ironically, “fictional certificate.”
Between work shifts, Leyla watches Turkish soaps and drifts around Berlin. She drinks alcohol left behind by hostel guests, and exchanges empty bottles for change. She goes clubbing with her bohemian, hard-partying friends (some poor immigrants like her, some Germans able to pay her cover). She interviews mid-tier celebrities at a bar; she attempts to write fiction. And she reflects on the circumstances that have led her to this point: her past life as a college student in Istanbul “high on American culture” crafting a Sylvia Plath-themed zine; her abusive father and the debts that impoverished her family when he died; the collapse of the Turkish economy and the brutality with which protesters and writers have been treated under the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Koca’s Leyla is naturally politicized — “you’re a real leftist,” a right-wing lover tells her — and keenly aware of the structures that have shaped her life: those of class, ethnicity, border, state. There are moments when Leyla’s analyses can border on the self-serious. “That’s the voice of capitalist patriarchy,” she says to the lover when he expresses a desire to take care of her.
At its most compelling, though, Leyla’s voice is wry and reflective, curious about her own ambivalences. Koca especially shines when illuminating “women’s pain,” which “lies beneath the territories of countries, of languages we speak. Our pain is an underland of its own, with teeth and blood, raising us all together in its womb. A cruel mother who then separates us, pits us against each other.” But at the same time, she chafes at Westerners who cannot understand her guilt at leaving her mother, who has never experienced her relative freedom, and with whom she believes she was supposed to be “cellmates in the prison called life.”Yet, in the tradition of writers like Ferrante, Koca shows that such a fate is also Leyla’s greatest fear.
Ultimately, the narrative force in “The Applicant” comes not primarily from Leyla’s precarious status under the Fiktionsbescheinigung, or even her impending choice between the inconstant life of an artist and the stability offered by her lover. It comes from a quieter uncertainty. “What do I want?” Leyla asks herself, over and over. “What do I want that I can get and won’t turn me into a Thérèse Chevalier, a Jeanne Dielman, my mother?” Leyla may not know the answer. But by the end of “The Applicant,” we can rest assured that she means to find out.
Shreya Chattopadhyay is a researcher at the Book Review.
THE APPLICANT | By Nazli Koca | 250 pp. | Grove | $26
