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New York Times, NY
Jan 20 2007
Armenian in Istanbul
By LORRAINE ADAMS
Published: January 21, 2007
There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet
denial's practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government
calls the butchers of Darfur `self-defense militias.' The Iranian
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as `myth.' In
an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society
describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914
and 1918 as `relocations' with `some untoward incidents.'
Skip to next paragraph
Marian Banjes
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL
By Elif Shafak.
360 pp. Viking. $24.95.
Readers' Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
It seems obvious that the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak smells the rot
in her homeland. Indeed, `The Bastard of Istanbul,' her sixth novel
and the second written in English, recently led to a suit by the
right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak's
Armenian characters were `insulting Turkishness' by referring to the
`millions' of Armenians `massacred' by `Turkish butchers' who `then
contentedly denied it all.' Earlier, Kerincsiz sued Turkey's
best-known novelist, the Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, for telling
a Swiss journalist that `30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were
killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.'
Pamuk's isolation is less than complete and his stance not entirely
daring. Kerincsiz and others have brought about 60 similar cases, a
majority concerning the Armenian genocide, and not one has resulted
in prison time. Kerincsiz, who helps organize demonstrations to
coincide with the court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes
Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union, and he
acknowledges that these circus displays of his country's censorship
laws aid his cause.
Although the international literary community has rallied behind
Pamuk and Shafak, both of whose cases were dismissed, there has been
decidedly less clamor about the suits brought against
Turkish-Armenian journalists, underpaid translators and long-standing
political activists. At the same time, Turkish nationalists have
charged that Pamuk's Nobel and Shafak's place in the spotlight have
had more to do with their persecution than with the merits of their
work.
The critical consensus on Pamuk is undeniably strong, that on Shafak
far less substantial. Most of her novels have not been reviewed in
the West, and with the recent uproar she has become more discussed
than read. In this new book, she has taken on a subject of deep moral
consequence. But is the work worthy of its subject?
`The Bastard of Istanbul,' set in the United States and Turkey,
concerns two families - one Turkish, living in Istanbul, and the
other Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco. (Shafak is
currently an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies at the
University of Arizona; she commutes between Tucson and Istanbul.)
An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It's no
surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the center of the
plot, is more of an enigma than a character. First seen in a Tucson
supermarket as a college student, he falls for and soon marries a
young American who has recently divorced her Armenian husband. Not
only does his new wife enjoy offending her Armenian in-laws with a
Turkish spouse, she also relishes the idea that her baby daughter
will have a Turkish stepfather.
That child, Armanoush, endures shuttle parenting, moving between her
mother in Arizona and her father and his relatives in San Francisco.
Shafak sketches these Armenians flatly and superficially, as
uniformly and fiercely anti-Turk - and as overprotectively fretful
about beautiful and bookish Armanoush. Instead of exploring her roots
with her own survivor family, she makes contact with
Armenian-Americans online, joining a chat group dedicated to
intellectual issues, including combating Turkish denial of the
massacres. At 21, Armanoush somewhat illogically decides to travel to
Istanbul, where none of her Armenian relatives remain. She stays with
her stepfather's Turkish family while keeping her mother and father
ignorant of her whereabouts.
The family this young woman encounters is a confusing swirl of four
generations of women that includes a great-grandmother suffering from
Alzheimer's disease; a disapproving, distant and angry grandmother;
her four daughters and one great-granddaughter. The eldest daughter
is a self-styled Muslim mystic; another is a high-school teacher, and
yet another a schizophrenic who lives in a fantasy world. The
youngest runs a tattoo parlor and has an illegitimate daughter, the
bastard of the novel's title.
Keeping all these women straight isn't crucial since they function
chiefly as adornments of Shafak's magic realism, the inhabitants of a
supernatural personal history. We learn, for example, that the men of
the family for `generations after generations ... had died young and
unexpectedly,' a contrivance that explains why Mustafa is living in
Tucson and has never returned to Istanbul to see his four sisters.
Armanoush's visit, which begins as an impulsive spurt of tourism,
unexpectedly leads to a far darker explanation of her stepfather's
exile. (Those who wish to read the novel and not have the ending
spoiled should stop here.) She inadvertently helps reveal Mustafa's
secret - that he raped his youngest sister, that this sister covered
up for him and that her child is a product of incest. It takes the
mystic sister, with the help of an evil djinni, to bring about both
her brother's death and his daughter's discovery of her origins.
Mustafa's crime is meant, presumably, to symbolize Turkey's
long-denied history of genocide. But the fate of the Armenians is by
no means obscure. In fact, scholars around the world have documented
it with precision. Unlike the members of the Armenian diaspora,
Mustafa's sister willfully hides the circumstances of her rape -
although it's difficult to believe that this miniskirted,
high-heeled, radically irreverent woman would have engaged in such
subterfuge.
When the novel's skeleton finally dances out of its flimsy closet,
it's clear that although Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction
she has yet to become - in English, at any rate - a good novelist. A
valuable moment in the klieg lights has been squandered, but Shafak,
still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer
whose artistry matches her ambition.
Lorraine Adams, a writer in residence at the New School and the
author of a novel, `Harbor,' is a regular contributor to the Book
Review.
Jan 20 2007
Armenian in Istanbul
By LORRAINE ADAMS
Published: January 21, 2007
There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet
denial's practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government
calls the butchers of Darfur `self-defense militias.' The Iranian
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as `myth.' In
an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society
describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914
and 1918 as `relocations' with `some untoward incidents.'
Skip to next paragraph
Marian Banjes
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL
By Elif Shafak.
360 pp. Viking. $24.95.
Readers' Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
It seems obvious that the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak smells the rot
in her homeland. Indeed, `The Bastard of Istanbul,' her sixth novel
and the second written in English, recently led to a suit by the
right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak's
Armenian characters were `insulting Turkishness' by referring to the
`millions' of Armenians `massacred' by `Turkish butchers' who `then
contentedly denied it all.' Earlier, Kerincsiz sued Turkey's
best-known novelist, the Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, for telling
a Swiss journalist that `30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were
killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.'
Pamuk's isolation is less than complete and his stance not entirely
daring. Kerincsiz and others have brought about 60 similar cases, a
majority concerning the Armenian genocide, and not one has resulted
in prison time. Kerincsiz, who helps organize demonstrations to
coincide with the court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes
Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union, and he
acknowledges that these circus displays of his country's censorship
laws aid his cause.
Although the international literary community has rallied behind
Pamuk and Shafak, both of whose cases were dismissed, there has been
decidedly less clamor about the suits brought against
Turkish-Armenian journalists, underpaid translators and long-standing
political activists. At the same time, Turkish nationalists have
charged that Pamuk's Nobel and Shafak's place in the spotlight have
had more to do with their persecution than with the merits of their
work.
The critical consensus on Pamuk is undeniably strong, that on Shafak
far less substantial. Most of her novels have not been reviewed in
the West, and with the recent uproar she has become more discussed
than read. In this new book, she has taken on a subject of deep moral
consequence. But is the work worthy of its subject?
`The Bastard of Istanbul,' set in the United States and Turkey,
concerns two families - one Turkish, living in Istanbul, and the
other Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco. (Shafak is
currently an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies at the
University of Arizona; she commutes between Tucson and Istanbul.)
An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It's no
surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the center of the
plot, is more of an enigma than a character. First seen in a Tucson
supermarket as a college student, he falls for and soon marries a
young American who has recently divorced her Armenian husband. Not
only does his new wife enjoy offending her Armenian in-laws with a
Turkish spouse, she also relishes the idea that her baby daughter
will have a Turkish stepfather.
That child, Armanoush, endures shuttle parenting, moving between her
mother in Arizona and her father and his relatives in San Francisco.
Shafak sketches these Armenians flatly and superficially, as
uniformly and fiercely anti-Turk - and as overprotectively fretful
about beautiful and bookish Armanoush. Instead of exploring her roots
with her own survivor family, she makes contact with
Armenian-Americans online, joining a chat group dedicated to
intellectual issues, including combating Turkish denial of the
massacres. At 21, Armanoush somewhat illogically decides to travel to
Istanbul, where none of her Armenian relatives remain. She stays with
her stepfather's Turkish family while keeping her mother and father
ignorant of her whereabouts.
The family this young woman encounters is a confusing swirl of four
generations of women that includes a great-grandmother suffering from
Alzheimer's disease; a disapproving, distant and angry grandmother;
her four daughters and one great-granddaughter. The eldest daughter
is a self-styled Muslim mystic; another is a high-school teacher, and
yet another a schizophrenic who lives in a fantasy world. The
youngest runs a tattoo parlor and has an illegitimate daughter, the
bastard of the novel's title.
Keeping all these women straight isn't crucial since they function
chiefly as adornments of Shafak's magic realism, the inhabitants of a
supernatural personal history. We learn, for example, that the men of
the family for `generations after generations ... had died young and
unexpectedly,' a contrivance that explains why Mustafa is living in
Tucson and has never returned to Istanbul to see his four sisters.
Armanoush's visit, which begins as an impulsive spurt of tourism,
unexpectedly leads to a far darker explanation of her stepfather's
exile. (Those who wish to read the novel and not have the ending
spoiled should stop here.) She inadvertently helps reveal Mustafa's
secret - that he raped his youngest sister, that this sister covered
up for him and that her child is a product of incest. It takes the
mystic sister, with the help of an evil djinni, to bring about both
her brother's death and his daughter's discovery of her origins.
Mustafa's crime is meant, presumably, to symbolize Turkey's
long-denied history of genocide. But the fate of the Armenians is by
no means obscure. In fact, scholars around the world have documented
it with precision. Unlike the members of the Armenian diaspora,
Mustafa's sister willfully hides the circumstances of her rape -
although it's difficult to believe that this miniskirted,
high-heeled, radically irreverent woman would have engaged in such
subterfuge.
When the novel's skeleton finally dances out of its flimsy closet,
it's clear that although Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction
she has yet to become - in English, at any rate - a good novelist. A
valuable moment in the klieg lights has been squandered, but Shafak,
still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer
whose artistry matches her ambition.
Lorraine Adams, a writer in residence at the New School and the
author of a novel, `Harbor,' is a regular contributor to the Book
Review.