Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA
Jan 14 2007
‘The Bastard of Istanbul’
Turkish author illuminates her country’s past and present
Sunday, January 14, 2007
By Sherrie Flick
At its heart, "The Bastard of Istanbul" examines the difference
between leaving and staying, or how the history of a place changes
when people choose to leave it, choose to stay or are forced away.
"THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL"
By Elif Shafak
Viking ($24.95)
Through an artfully cast, intertangled web of characters, Elif Shafak
shows how Armenians abroad remember the Armenian genocide in what is
now modern-day Turkey compared to those generations that remained
behind, how learning to be an Armenian in the United States isn’t the
same as being an Armenian in Turkey where there is no learning, and
instead, simply living in the present.
Grudges remain intact in those who have stayed away, while they have
evaporated closer to the scene of the crime.
The bastard of the title is Asya, a 19-year-old Turkish girl in
Istanbul, the daughter of zesty, spirited Zehila Kazanci, who "was
the youngest of four girls who could not agree on anything but
retained an identical conviction of always being right, and feeling
each had nothing to learn from the other, but lots to teach."
Asya grows up calling her own mother, as well as her actual aunts,
"auntie," and is thus raised by a household of eccentric Turkish
matriarchs.
The novel begins in flashback with a 19-year-old Zehila walking the
bustling, rainy streets of Istanbul in a miniskirt and heels as she
makes her way toward an abortion appointment that does not come to
fruition.
Men tended to die early in the Kazanci family. The one Kazanci son,
Mustapha, has left the family for the United States in order to avoid
his fate. He marries a hapless but obsessive Arizonian, Rose, who has
a 19-year-old daughter, Armanoush, from a previous marriage to an
Armenian.
Encouraged by her Internet Armenian-genocide obsessed chat room, she
travels to Turkey to stay with her stepfather’s family (without his
knowledge) in order to better confront her own history, immediately
striking up a friendship with Asya.
These two Turkish families become crazily combined in present and
past in a plot that is increasingly harder to follow (all the names
becoming nearly impossible to keep straight) as the final, surprising
chapters of the book unfold.
Each chapter is titled with a different food that makes an
appearance. Cinnamon, roasted hazelnuts, vanilla, pistachios, orange
peel, dried apricots, pomegranate seeds, dried figs and rosewater
waft from page to page becoming the city of Istanbul itself, making
the setting rich and intense.
Shafak is author of five previous bestselling novels, and this is her
second written in English. She was recently accused of "insulting
Turkishness" in the first application of Article 301 of Turkish law
used against a work of fiction — the nationalist lawyers who filed
the complaint claimed her novel was Armenian propaganda, "dripping
with hatred for the Turks."
Shafak’s characters freely acknowledge and discuss the 1915 Armenian
genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, a holocaust that
Turks still strongly and officially deny. She was acquitted due to
lack of evidence.
Since its 2005 inception, more than 60 writers have been charged
under the law.
In Shafak’s novel it is the Armenian family who is against fiction:
"Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more
dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the
cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open
to surprises as a moonless night in the desert."
The Turks embrace stories of all kinds. In fact, the novel’s story is
connected by literature — folk stories, existential philosophy,
Milan Kundera, Johnny Cash.
Through her characters Shafak examines how the stories we love and
the stories we tell become who we are.
Shafak’s writing is beautiful and meaningful and will astound you as
you find the many ways to claim the story as, also, your own:
"It is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold
between nighttime and daylight. It is the only time in which it is
still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build
them anew."
This is an important book about forgetting, about retelling stories,
about denial (which isn’t always a bad thing), about not knowing your
past, about knowing your past, and about choosing (again and again)
to start over.