The Applicant by Nazli Koca (Grove Press, release date February 2023)

A prose poem that serves as a preface gives a misleading cast to Nazli Koca’s smart and enigmatic novel, The Applicant. “I will do whatever you ask…For Free.” Although this is the stereotypical image of immigrants who hope to come to the West, this isn’t Leyla.

Leyla is what used to be called “a slacker.” She comes to Berlin from Istanbul to gain the MFA that will give her credibility as a writer. Now after six years in a city that she’s allowed to intoxicate her, her thesis has been rejected and she’s lost her student visa. She’s spent all the money that was left to her from her father’s depleted wealth, wasting it gleefully on living a vagabond life, but Leyla still clings to the idea of privilege. Educated in international schools that gave her fluent English and an American point of view, she always knew she’d leave Turkey for Europe--she deserved it. Now she fights to remain in Berlin, on a temporary visa while waiting for her thesis to be reevaluated and approved.

Sharing an apartment with an expat from Cuba, Leyla works as a cleaner in a hip hostel, a clandestine job that she can skate through while concentrating on her real life-- the one that gives her the freedom to be high and drunk, while dreaming about writing. She drifts into an affair with a Swedish “good-hearted giant from a Grimm’s fairy tale.”, a man who’s never smoked a cigarette nor taken a drug, a right-wing conservative whose favorite food is “American cuisine.” The Swede takes her to his country, introduces her to his family, and wants to marry her. As Leyla’s dream of having her thesis approved seem less and less conceivable, she begins to cling to this man as her “antithesis,” not a dream but a pragmatic possibility.

It would be easy to dismiss this novel as a rehash of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll novels of the cocaine-fueled 80s as told by Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz, but Nazli Koca is far too smart to fall into that category. Framing Leyla’s narrative in the form of her diary, she dissects the varying degrees of privilege, where all the winning cards seem to be held by “journal-published, MFA-holding, successfully employed” American men. She shows the exhilaration that comes from the freedom of living in a place where the only forbidden speech is the two words that come as a pair, both beginning with the letter h, along with the hope that comes with that freedom--and its accompanying threat of self-destruction. Most of all, she reveals the inequities that come with a passport--where some are allowed to travel as they wish while far too many others are caught in bureaucratic regulations and restrictions. 

“I’m so tired ot the anxiety that’s attached to my passport,” Leyla complains, but she learns her Turkish passport is one that might only be good for pulling her back home. “Mastering the art of escape” is as much of an illusion as her belief that the life she’s adopted has given her the protection of invisibility. 

“A poor immigrant who wants to create art is irrelevant,” she says, but Leyla’s immigrant status is tentative, despite her background, her education, her fluency in English. “My weapons never stood a chance against death or life,” she says, as she discovers there are no easy solutions. Wisely Nazli Koca doesn’t offer any, concluding only with uncertainty and the uncomfortable truth that when it comes to immigration, the dice are loaded and the game is rigged.~Janet Brown