10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Content Warning: This section discusses death and murder, mistreatment of sex workers, human trafficking, and gendered violence.

“She was waiting for the sun to rise. Surely then someone would find her and get her out of this filthy bin. She did not expect the authorities to take long to figure out who she was. All they had to do was locate her file.”

Leila, after realizing that she has died and that her body was abandoned in a dumpster, wonders when someone will find her. Leila’s body being disposed of in a dumpster like someone would dispose of garbage implies that the society in Istanbul views sex workers as worthless and at the bottom of the hierarchy.

“Time became fluid, a fast flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and the present inseparable.”

Time and memory are motifs within the novel that help the author explore the way that different events in our lives shape us as people. By depicting time as something that is inseparable, the author further implies that people are who they are in the present because of their pasts.

“She would have to marry again—but there was no guarantee that her next marriage would be any happier or a new husband more to her liking, and who would have her anyway, a divorcee, a used woman?”

One of the themes that the author explores in this novel is the concept of gendered expectations. As Bennaz contemplates what would happen to her if her husband divorced her for not giving him a son, she depicts to the reader what her role as a woman is defined within this society. Women should not be unmarried, so she would have to marry a stranger regardless of her affection for him. She would also be seen as a “used woman”; the word “used” in this context displays the objectification of women within society.