Tag: Elif Shafak

Review 2228: The Island of Missing Trees

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I’ve now read three books by Elif Shafak, but I always have the same problem. Some choice she makes in the narrative style separates me from getting fully involved. In this case, it’s the blasted fig tree.

In the 2010s, Ada is the sixteen-year-old daughter of Cypriot parents living in London. Her mother died the year before, and she is grieving. Her father, an introverted plant scientist who is also grieving, is not much help. Her parents went through traumatic events when they were in their teens during the invasion of Cyprus. Further, their marriage meant a break from their families, as Kostos is Greek and Defne was Turkish. Ada would like to understand more, but Kostos promised Dephne not to talk to Ada about their past.

Just before the holidays, Ada has a sort of breakdown in school, and her behavior is recorded and put on social media. She is depressed and hostile until her Aunt Meryem, whom she has never met, arrives for a visit. She is angry with her aunt because she didn’t come to Dephne’s funeral, but from her she begins to learn about Cyprus and her parents.

The chapters involving humans are separated by chapters narrated by a fig tree that Kostos brought from Cyprus. This fig tree knows all about the history of Cyprus as well as about various creatures. Plus, it is visited by numerous birds and insects, all of which have stories to tell or the tree has facts about them to impart. Every time I came close to getting involved in the flow of the story, there was a chapter by the fig tree to interrupt it. I finished the book, but I almost put it down numerous times, and I started skipping through the tree’s sections.

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Review 1752: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Elif Shafak is one of the most widely read Turkish women writers. I have only read one of her books so far, so when I saw 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World on my Booker prize list, I was interested to revisit her. However, I’m not entirely sure what I think of this unusual novel.

The convention of the first part of the novel is that Leila, a sex worker in Istanbul, has been murdered. Her brain is active for 10 minutes and 38 seconds while she revisits scenes from her life, each chapter representing a minute of brain activity. These chapters are separated by short sections about the lives of her five friends, who all in some way live on the fringes of society.

My first reaction was an impatience with this idea, that 10 minutes was to be represented by nearly 200 pages of text. I have a real problem with attempts like this in fiction to represent a short amount of time with several hours worth of reading. In this case, though, I got used to the idea but felt that the sections introducing the friends are an inelegant solution to our barely seeing them in the first part of the novel while the second part deals with how they handle the aftermath of Leila’s death.

And the change of tone in the second part is what bothered me most. For, we go abruptly from an elegiac tone in the first part while we learn about Leila’s difficult life to one of almost madcap comedy as a bunch of lovable misfits try to give Leila an ending she deserves. To me, this felt like a grinding change of gears.

It is brave of Shafak in her country to write about violence against women, especially since I understand she is being investigated by the Turkish authorities for it (or was when I read this months ago), but her supporting characters seem almost like caricatures to me, possibly because we don’t see that much of them in the first part. I felt like the second part of the novel almost undercuts the first part.

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Day 506: The Bastard of Istanbul

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Cover for The Bastard of IstanbulTwo 19-year-old girls are the focus of The Bastard of Istanbul, which is full of colorful characters. First, though, we meet Zeliha Kazancı, twenty years before most of the action of the novel. She is notable on the streets of Istanbul during the 80’s for her miniskirts and incredibly high heels, her colorful outfits and jangly jewelry. She is defiant of convention, and bitingly invents rules of prudence for Istanbulite women as she makes her way to have an abortion. But fate intervenes.

In Arizona, Zeliha’s brother Mustafa is a student when he meets an American woman and her baby in the supermarket. Rose is newly divorced from an Armenian American, and she thinks nothing would enrage her husband’s family more than her dating a Turk.

Nineteen years later, Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian loves her father’s Armenian family, but because her parents have been at loggerheads her entire life, she does not feel totally at home on the Armenian side. She decides to visit her stepfather Mustafa’s family in Istanbul so that she can see the house her Armenian grandmother used to live in before they had to flee and try to learn more about her heritage.

In Istanbul, Asya Kazancı is even more of a rebel than her mother Zeliha. She is an angry girl who hates being a bastard and thinks of herself as a nihilist. She hangs out with a group of rather effete intellectuals at the Café Kundera. She is not pleased to learn her four aunties expect her to act as a hostess to her uncle Mustafa’s American stepdaughter.

Eccentric women dominate the Kazancı household. Asya’s great-grandmother Petite-Ma is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Her grandmother Gűlsűm is a bitter woman who spoiled her son Mustafa rotten only to have him go to America and never return. Her oldest auntie Banu is the only observant Muslim in the house, but she also is a soothsayer, who learns the future from two djinnis that sit on her shoulders. Cevriya is a rather didactic schoolteacher, and Feride toys with different types of mental illness. Zeliha, whom Asya also calls auntie, is as colorful as ever and owns a tattoo parlor.

Shafak writes in a light-hearted style that mixes in folk tales, superstitions, and family legends and is often comic. Yet it deals with some serious subjects, one being modern Turkish identity and another the Armenian diaspora. Armanoush finds when she arrives that most of the people she meets have never heard of this latter subject that has her American-Armenian friends so angry. The subject matter is an odd contrast with the light tone, for Armanoush’s visit brings old family secrets out into the open, and they are dark ones.

This novel is well written and interesting, but I can’t decide how much I like it. I feel that the narrative style somehow keeps the reader aloof from the characters so that they remain unknowable. Still, the novel gives glimpses into life in a fascinating country and informs us on historical events of which many people still are unaware. And it includes a recipe.