When I set out to become a novelist in Turkey in the early 2000s, Leylâ Erbil had yet to publish what is perhaps her most accomplished work, What Remains (2011), an experimental bildungsroman written in verse about a woman obsessed with Istanbul’s stones, and published in an English translation last fall. Back then my favorite novels were Flaubert’s Parrot, The Name of the Rose and My Name is Red—...