In Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, the unnamed first-person narrator traces her life from embryo to her departure to Germany as a young woman of approximately eighteen or nineteen years old. Although the story is governed by a conventional chronological framework, specific references to the narrator's age are extremely rare, and dates are entirely withheld. Time and age are not in themselves of importance to this narrator, whose impressions and responses to her experience of family, neighbours, neighbourhoods and customs provide the text's momentum. The narrator tells the story of her family's many moves from one town in Turkey to another, following her father, Mustafa, in his constant pursuit of employment as a building contractor. Born in Anatolia, the narrator lives first in Istanbul, then in the small religious town of Yenisehir, then for a long and largely happy time in Bursa, until the increasing pressures of unemployment and poverty force the family to move to Ankara. After a period of near destitution, Mustafa succeeds in finding a job through an old acquaintance in Istanbul, and they return to this city, from where the narrator departs for Germany.

This text is intensely impressionistic; the narrator recalls events, people and places, does so evocatively and with sensual immediacy, but makes no attempt to link episodes, explain them or subordinate them to a unifying scheme or plot development.