Turkish author illuminates her country's past and present
"THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL" - By Elif Shafak - Viking ($24.95)
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.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.
(Sherrie Flick is co-founder and artistic director for the Gist Street Reading Series. She has work in the anthology "New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond" published by W.W. Norton. )