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Scotsman, United Kingdom
July 15 2007
Skeletons in the closet
LORRAINE ADAMS
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL
Elif Shafak
Viking, £16.99
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-defence 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".
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".
Kerincsiz, who helps organise demonstrations to coincide with the
court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes Turkey's bid for
membership of the EU, and he acknowledges that these circus displays
of his country's censorship laws aid his cause.
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, in Istanbul, and the other
Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco.
An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It's no
surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the centre 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 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 parlour 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 symbolise 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 wilfully 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 light has been squandered, but Shafak,
still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer
whose artistry matches her ambition. v
Elif Shafak appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,
August 11, 2.30pm
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
July 15 2007
Skeletons in the closet
LORRAINE ADAMS
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL
Elif Shafak
Viking, £16.99
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-defence 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".
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".
Kerincsiz, who helps organise demonstrations to coincide with the
court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes Turkey's bid for
membership of the EU, and he acknowledges that these circus displays
of his country's censorship laws aid his cause.
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, in Istanbul, and the other
Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco.
An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It's no
surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the centre 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 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 parlour 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 symbolise 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 wilfully 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 light has been squandered, but Shafak,
still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer
whose artistry matches her ambition. v
Elif Shafak appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,
August 11, 2.30pm
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress