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Cornucopia – September 2005 -- Parallel Universe
By Andrew Finkel -- (Reviewed in Cornucopia No 34) -- The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, $25, 368 pages. -- The Saint of Incipient Insanities confirms
Elif Shafak’s membership of a new wave of Turkish literary and
artistic figures who travel unencumbered across cultural boundaries.
It is her fifth novel, her second to appear in English but the first
to be written in English, having made its perverse way to the
Turkish bestseller list in Turkish translation. The Saint of
Incipient Insanities is set in its own peculiar universe without
frontiers, that of the international student flat-share in Boston
where three postgraduates, from Turkey, Morocco and Spain, try (and
mostly fail) to make sense of love and life as they quest...
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Boston Globe – November 7, 2004 -- THE SAINT OF INCIPIENT INSANITIES , By Elif Shafak. Farrar Straus Giroux.
351 pp. $25 -- Reviewed by Amanda Heller -- It is a paradigm of the new
American melting pot, the Somerville apartment where much of this
voluble, high-energy novel takes place, a vat in which nothing melts
but only gets mulled and muddled in contact with all the other
exotic ingredients. Here we find the lapsed Muslim mer, a graduate
student from Turkey working his way through every woman and every
bar from Harvard Yard to Davis Square and wondering where he mislaid
his identity...
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Orlando Sentinel - November 7, 2004 -- STRANGERS
IN STRANGE LAND STRUGGLE TO FEEL AT HOME --Reviewed By William
Mckeen, Special to the Sentinel -- The Saint of Incipient
Insanities by Elif Shafak, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 368
pages. -- Maybe it goes like this -- we spend the first part of
life trying to leave home, and the last part of life trying to find
home. The Saint of Incipient Insanities is about a lot of things,
but the concept of home seems to echo on every page. The story is
driven by three immigrant graduate students in post 9-11 America: a
Turk, a Moroccan and a Spaniard living in Boston and pursuing
academic careers...
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San Francisco Chronicle -- Sunday, November 7,
2004 -- Longing for belonging -- Reviewed by Malena Watrous --
The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak -- FARRAR,
STRAUS & GIROUX; 351 PAGES; $25 -- Despite coming from a Muslim
family in Istanbul, Omer, a doctoral student in political science
living in Cambridge, Mass., loves womanizing, alcohol and pork
products, much to the dismay of his more pious Moroccan roommate,
Abed. The only vice indulged by Abed, a graduate student of
biotechnology, is the slasher movies he watches to dispel nightmares
haunted by women he's too shy to approach...
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The Washington Post -- Sunday, October
31, 2004 -- Strangers in a Strange Land -- Reviewed by Janice P.
Nimura -- THE SAINT OF INCIPIENT INSANITIES , By Elif Shafak.
Farrar Straus Giroux. 351 pp. $25 -- Elif Shafak was born in
France and raised in Spain, has published four novels in Turkish and
now teaches at the University of Michigan. She may be intimate with
the disorientation of the expatriate, but she does not restrict
herself to a literal definition of border-crossing. As the
characters in her exuberant, uneven first novel in English make
clear, feeling like an alien has little to do with visa status...
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Booklist - September 15, 2004 - Starred Review --
Shafak, Elif. The Saint of Incipient Insanities -- Oct. 2004. 368p. Farrar,
$25 (0-374-25357-9). -- Three
roommates, Omer, Abed, and Piyu, are all foreigners, studying and living in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Omer, a handsome party boy studying political
science, has recently arrived from Istanbul, and he lands a room in the
house of Abed, from Morocco, and Piyu, a dental student from Spain. Omer
falls in love with the neurotic vegan lesbian Gail, and they eventually
marry. Abed is a consummate worrier...
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The Economist - August 12, 2004 -- Turkish fiction
-- Problems of identity -- Readers looking for a less intense
taste of Turkey can turn to “The Saint of Incipient Insanities”, the
first novel written in English by Elif Shafak, an established writer
with award-winning Turkish novels under her belt, who has been
attacked for reviving Ottoman words, for her fascination with
religion, and now for “betraying” her motherland by writing in
English. Ms Shafak has woven a tragi-comic tapestry of quirky and
lovable 20-somethings struggling to find themselves in America...
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