The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Over the weekend I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. I posted a review on my litblog, but because that is hosted by Wordpress (which is still blocked in Turkey), I repost the entire review here.

______________________________

"What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboulian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa! What kind of a joke is that!"

This passage, shouted out by one of the characters in The Bastard of Istanbul, is what got Elif Shafak in court for "insulting Turkishness", another case based on the by now infamous Article 301. The case against Shafak was eventually dropped, but she became well-known as one of the very few Turkish authors, together with for example Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, who was not afraid to tackle the issue of the Armenian genocide in a way that was not well appreciated (to put it mildly) by the Turkish authorities.

Armanoush is the child of an Armenian father and an American mother who remarried with a Turkish man. She divides her time between her mother in Arizona and her father's family in San Fransisco. When she feels something in her identity is missing, she sets off on a trip to Istanbul, to stay with her stepfather's family and find out more about her past. In Istanbul, she becomes fast friends with Asya, the youngest member of her stepfather's family.

The Armenian genocide is a major theme in the story, but eventually it is one of the ways the bigger theme of dealing with the past is worked out. All of the major characters have something in their past they have to deal with, either by accepting it or denying it or, even before acceptation or denial, by trying to find out what their past actually is.

The first chapter was hard to finish - I didn't like the writing style, very "flowering" with long sentences and many adjectives. I regularly had to reread a sentence to actually get the meaning. Fortunately, that was only the first chapter, after that I either got used to the language or the style changed (I guess it was a bit of both). Anyway, I got hooked and, having started the book on Saturday afternoon, had finished it Sunday before dinner.

It is a beautifully told story with an interesting plot, if somewhat constructed at times. I felt as if the author wanted to represent all the different opinions on the Armenian genocide in the book. There is the staunch Turkish nationalist who is absolutely convinced that there was no genocide and that, on the contrary, the Armenians killed the Turks en masse. There is the Turk who acknowledges that the Turks did horrible things to the Armenians during World War I, but that that was in the past and that the current generation is not responsible for it. There is also the Armenian who thinks that Armenians still living in Turkey are being repressed and who is convinced that they'd be better off emigrating. There is the somewhat skeptical Armenian who thinks that striving for recognition of the genocide is the only thing that still binds the Diaspora and that once recognition by Turkey has been achieved, the Diaspora will fall apart. Finally there is the Armenian who was born and raised in Istanbul, feels Istanbulite first and foremost and doesn't want to live anywhere else. This urge to represent all those opinions led to superfluous scenes and even characters in my opinion. I ended up quickly reading the superfluous parts and then diving back into the rest of the book.

There were already so many characters, major and minor, that at times, especially when the perspective changed for example from San Fransisco to Istanbul or from present to past or back, I had to try to remember who was who and what the relation's were between them. On the other hand, this extensive set of characters was also part of why I loved the book. I especially loved Asya's family with all their quirky characters. Armanoush initially started out as an interesting character as well, but soon I started finding her a bit bland, colorless, especially compared to colorful Asya and her equally colorful family.

I am not sure the book is among my favorite reads of this year, but I did enjoy it very much and am certainly interested in reading more by Elif Shafak.

This review is crossposted at The Armenian Odar Reads.

Bookblogging

My entire life my one continuous passion has been books and reading, so a couple of months ago I finally started a separate blog discussing the books I read and other bookrelated things. From time to time I'll read books that are probably interesting for the readers of Internations as well, so I will post those reviews here as well. The following is one such review. If you are curious what else I read, just head over to The Armenian Odar Reads.
__________________


"Stories from the Sandgate" by Jaklin Celik is a collection of short stories I found in a bookstore about ten days ago. Celik is an Armenian-Turkish writer who grew up in the Kumkapi neighborhood in Istanbul. Kumkapi means Sandgate - all the stories are set in this neighborhood. According to the preface, the district of Kumkapi is a working class neighborhood originally in habited mainly by Greeks and Armenians. Recently, though, the district is being populated by newly arrived migrants from Turkey's eastern and southeastern provinces. The author herself arrived in Kumkapi at the age of six, moving there with her family from Diyarbakir. Many of the Armenians and Greeks who used to live in Kumkapi, have since moved on to Greece, the US and Europe.

Except for one or two, all thirteen stories have a fleeting feeling about them: It is as if you step into people's lives for a brief moment and then you step out again. The timespan the stories cover is usually very short. Most of the stories are not even ten pages long (the entire book has only 118 pages). The stories all have a feeling of timelessness about them. There is hardly anything in them that gives a clue about the time-period the story is set in, but I have a feeling that the stories are set in the last twenty or thirty years.

House Hunting recounts the meeting of an Assyrian woman and her daughter with two old Armenian ladies, Kayane and Azat, who are looking for tenants to share their house. The timespan of this story is only the duration of the short meeting between the four, maybe half an hour. This story was one of my favorites, probably because of the glimpse into the future it gives.

Like most of the other stories, Women's Ward left me with more questions than answers: Who is the woman handing out cigarettes to the female patients at the mental hospital? Why is she doing this?

One of three stories that make up the Station Trilogy, The Diyarbakir-Istanbul Line gives a glimpse into one train compartment in the train from Diyarbakir in the east of Turkey to Istanbul on the other side of the country. The compartment is inhabited by three women who have eight children among them. Two of them are Kurdish and are joining their husbands who are working in Istanbul. The third woman, an Armenian, is originally also from Diyarbakir, but has been living in Istanbul for some time. This was one of my favorite stories as well.

The New Bride was another favorite of mine. With 25 pages it is by far the longest story in the collection. The main character is seventy-seven years old Kirkor who wants to remarry with a young woman after his first wife died a long time ago. His son is obviously very upset about this. Eventually Kirkor finds a bride from the province. But is she really such a good choice?

Though I am not absolutely wild about the book, I liked the stories, the way they give you a glimpse into the lives of people. Hardly any background, if any at all, is given about the characters, but somehow you learn something about them in the few pages of the story and most of the characters become more rounded. Still, you are always left with questions about them, about their pasts or their actions, who they are, why they do what they do.

One thing that irritated me was the amount of typo's or spelling mistakes. They weren't all over the place, but frequent enough to notice. This shouldn't have been too hard to avoid, especially since the publisher of the English translation is an American publisher specializing in Turkish books (I had a look at their website and found some interesting books there).

I had never heard of Jaklin Celik before, but I am interested enough to find out more about her and especially if she has published anything else.

NB: For the Turkish speakers who read this: I am aware of spelling mistakes in some of the locations and in the last name of the author. I tried, but was unable to insert the proper letters, that's why. My apologies!