Details:
- author: Nazli Koca
- full title: The Applicant
- narrator: Günes Sensoy
- genre: literary fiction
- topics: #immigrant, #turkish, #berlin
- publisher: Recorded Books
- publish date: 14 Feb 2023
- timing: 5:44:00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙💙
- narration: 💙💙💙💙.5
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| Goodreads |
My Thoughts:
Layla is a Turkish student in Berlin. She failed her thesis and consequently lost her student visa. Now she works in a hostel where she cleans rooms and toilets.For me, Layla was not very likable. Overuse of drugs didn’t help here. I couldn’t understand why Layla wants to stay in Berlin and has no interest in learning German (she clarified this towards the end, but it wasn’t convincing). Maybe she has other worries at the moment, and this is the reason. Although I didn’t like or get her many times, I understood her struggles as an immigrant and in becoming a writer.
Narration was very good, and I loved the Turkish additions interwoven in Layla’s diaries. You can sometimes guess the meaning. But it is nothing essential for the story.
All in all, I liked The Applicant. It is a very honest novel in diary form, and it documents one immigrant struggles in another country.
About the Author:
Nazlı Koca is a writer and poet from Turkey who now lives in the US. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. She has worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, and bookseller while her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Bookforum, Second Factory, Chicago Review of Books, and books without covers, among other outlets. The Applicant is her first novel.
