Some of the other titles in the By the Same Author are equally evocative - I particularly like The Happiness of Blond People, and The Saint of Incipient Insanities. So she definitely gives good title... Does she give good book is the next question.
10 Minutes and 38 Seconds refers to the length of time it's reckoned brain activity can continue after a person dies. The first two thirds of the book tell us about what goes through the mind of a murdered prostitute in those minutes.
What does go through her mind is her entire life. Basically, it's a slightly more interesting format for telling us the character's entire back story leading up to her death and the subsequent dumping in a dustbin in the alleys of Istanbul.
She does have some memories that couldn't possibly be hers - for example, the thoughts of and conversations between her birth mother and her father, also a brief flashback of her birth mother's life and how she came to be the second wife of her father...
That's being a little picky I admit. The story of her life is well told, despite having very few surprises. We know where she's going to end up so we know this isn't going to be a particularly joyous existance and the story beats are familiar, but written well enough to be excused.
Along the way through her life journey, we are introduced to five of her friends, known imaginatively in the text as "the five". These are important charcaters because, after she's finally gone and her brain activity has ceased permanently, the narrative switches to these guys and girls.
This is where the book starts to fall down a little. Although there had been moments of levity in the first section, to balance out the misery, once we're following the Five, things take a tonal shift that grates badly and there are scenes of slapstick comedy.
We also get a couple of random chapters that don't seem to have any point. The narrative switches for one chapter to a seller of late night snacks who recognises that his customers in the nice black car have probably killed someone - due to the highly visible bloodstains spattered throughout the car's interior. We also witness a scene where her last client goes to see his father to challenge his father over the deaths of four out of five of the ladies of the night that his father has sent his way. Neither of these scenes is ever followed up on and I wonder why they're in the book as the potential storylines opened in these chapters simply never materialise.
The Five are not paricularly well drawn characters. They seem to have been chosen just to shoehorn in social issues and don't have much of a personality beyond their particular social sub-group. Here's the trans girl, here's the dwarf, etc. Their quest to give their friend a more appropriate resting place occupies most of the last third of the book.
The final section attempts to tag a happy ending onto the story of the dead prostitute. It either works or it doesn't depending on how spiritual you're feeling at the time of reading.
Overall, this was a good book, despite the jarring tonal shift, it kept me entertained and I sped through the 300 pages in a couple of days.
I think 7.5/10
Available from all good, and bad, booksellers.
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