A PRISM HELD TO TURKEY
Reviewed by Anne Julie Wyman
San Fransisco Chronicle
Oct 15 2006
Mystic, kaleidoscopic novel by writer often compared to Pamuk
The Gaze
By Elif Shafak; translated by Brendan Freely
MARION BOYARS BOOKS; 264 Pages; $14.95 PAPERBACK
Orhan Pamuk, some say, is writing Turkey. Writing books, too, but
mostly crafting his country’s identity right before our astonished
Western eyes.
While there’s some truth to that — Pamuk himself admits that
Turkey had few very prominent writers a generation or two ago —
he’s certainly not doing it alone. Elif Shafak, his most talented
contemporary, provides a type of insight into Turkey’s spiritual
bloodlines that Pamuk often does not. Funnily enough, Shafak, the
daughter of a Turkish diplomat, born in France and educated in Spain,
professes that she never felt quite at home in Turkey anyhow.
Like Istanbul itself, Shafak is multicultural, multivalent,
multi-ethnic. At 35, she has already lived many lives away from
Istanbul, in Germany and Jordan as well as France and Spain (currently,
she’s an assistant professor at the University of Arizona). Her
characters are Turkish, Siberian, American, Spanish, Armenian,
Jewish, young, old, ageless, Eastern, Western and sometimes none
of the above. Even her prose circles endlessly, every last syllable
tumbled against its fellows to an almost blinding shininess.
Her most recent English release, "The Gaze," is set in Istanbul
(and Russia and France and two other centuries), but for Shafak it’s
standard issue — it’s disjointed, and it’s dazzling.
Which is not to say it’s perfect. Bedazzlement is not clarity. Nor
is it very satisfying, nor does it preclude frustration.
Good thing, then, that for the most part Shafak knows what she’s
doing. A very good thing, as "The Gaze" splits itself along two rather
convoluted lines. In one, a morbidly obese anonymous bulimic woman
lives with her lover, a dwarf named B-C. The two dress in drag every
so often and leave their apartment for the express purpose of being
seen, punishing themselves and others for looking. In the other, an
immortal faceless man recruits two women, one impossibly ugly and one
impossibly beautiful, and stages a fantastical circus in 19th century
Istanbul. His performances are for single-sex audiences, focusing
on the differences in the ways men and women see — and by seeing,
damage — themselves and each other. The lovers’ sections are further
fractured by entries from the Dictionary of Gazes, B-C’s massive
tome-in-progress of Turkish words related to sight. Also included
are extended dream sequences and flashbacks of childhood trauma,
narrated by the obese woman. The circus section includes lengthy
jaunts to 19th century France and 17th century Siberia via folklore.
Complicated enough? Shafak’s style is repetitive, supersaturated
and usually entertaining, but at times heavy-handed. "The Gaze’s"
structure is similarly complex. Its twin plots are at first so rigidly
separated that when they finally merge, it’s like witnessing a little
literary miracle of life, inspiring and confusing all at once. What
a trick she pulls — the book’s ending lays bare the beginning of its
creation. This is the way Shafak works: She piles it on and piles it
on, and then, just when you feel you’ve been buried alive, she yanks
it all away and you get to see heaven.
Shafak herself is deeply spiritual, if not religious. Her first novel,
"Pinhan," which has not been released yet in English, received a
Turkish prize for mysticism and transcendentalism in literature.
The narrative structure of another novel, "The Flea Palace,"
corresponds to the architecture of an apartment building. It’s the most
accessible of her less linear work. "The Gaze" was published in Turkey
in 1999 and released in the United States after "The Saint of Incipient
Insanities." "The Bastard of Istanbul" was released in Turkey in 2005
and will be published in the United States by Viking in January.
Both "The Saint of Incipient Insanities" and "The Bastard of Istanbul"
were written in English, a move perceived by many nationalist Turks as
a betrayal of what Shafak calls Turkey’s language-cleansing project, a
state-sponsored purge of tens of thousands of old or foreign words from
Turkish. As "The Gaze’s" complex Dictionary attests, Shafak pays more
attention to her terminology than almost any other writer. For example:
"ayna (mirror): The odalisques in the harem couldn’t get their fill
of looking at their unsurpassed beauty in the mirrors that had been
brought from Venice. Their greatest desire was for the Sultan to see
what the mirror showed."
As "The Gaze" so idiosyncratically probes, a mirror’s real magic —
and its danger — is not at its surface but in the depths of the
person reflected in it. Shafak’s narrator hates how others see her,
but her shame is achingly deep, expressed through both her eating
disorder and her relationship with B-C. "Love is a corset," she says.
"In order to understand why it lasts such a short time you have to
be exceedingly fat."
As such piercing reflection attests, two factors, shame and honesty,
determine the crystallization or destruction of identity in "The
Gaze." But the narrator’s search for an intact self represents a
nearly universal process. It’s one that occurs in the relationship
of self to body, in the soul, on the page, in families, marriages,
communities. The relationship of contemporary Turkish writers to
Turkey, to each other and to themselves is also one mediated by
individual honesty and collective shame. What do I admit? That the
Ottoman Empire committed acts of genocide? How much trouble will I
get in for admitting it? What does Turkey want the rest of the world
to see? Do I care? What is Turkey? Is it Eastern or Western? Can it
be both? Istanbul is a jeweled city; Istanbul is a rotting city. It
is here, between mortification and pride, where Turkish writers are
often at the mercy of their country’s more defensive instincts.
"The Bastard of Istanbul" mentions the 1915 massacre of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians by the Turks. It was for those mentions that
Shafak was recently accused of violating Article 301 of the Turkish
Penal Code, which provides grounds for as much as three years of
imprisonment for "insulting Turkishness." In December, Pamuk was
charged under Article 301 for remarks he made about the Armenian
genocide to a Swiss magazine.
He was the keynote speaker at this year’s PEN/International World
Voices festival; according to the organization’s notes on Turkey,
dozens of Turkish writers have faced similar charges, though most
have not been jailed. Article 301 is one of the reasons Turkey has not
yet been admitted to the European Union. Imprisoning your writers —
to put it bluntly — looks pretty bad. Pamuk’s charges were dropped
in January, the week the EU began its scrutiny of the Turkish Penal
Code. Shafak’s were dropped in September, six days after the birth
of her first child.
Stylistically, the two novelists are not often compared, though both
have produced a number of intricate puzzles. In novels such as "Snow"
and "My Name Is Red," Pamuk makes much of suspense, deception and
stories within stories.
Shafak, too, loves structural conceit, masquerades and hide-and-seek.
Pamuk’s prose is much more reserved than Shafak’s; in "Istanbul:
Memories and the City," he admits he has a taste for monochromatics,
the exposed grays of Istanbul’s wooden palaces, the sooty cobbles,
the purity of the snow, while her "Gaze" shatters that same city and
shovels the pieces into a giant psychedelic kaleidoscope.
Still, reading Shafak and Pamuk side by side is a joyful project. For
example, in "The Gaze’s" Dictionary of Gazes, there’s an entry on
"Pamuk Prenses" — Snow White. And in "Snow," Pamuk writes about Reat
Ekrem Kocu, the first native of Istanbul to make an encyclopedia of
the city’s spectacles.
These small pleasures — of which there are hundreds, despite Shafak
and Pamuk’s hugely different styles — signify that as a collective,
this new literary Turkey possesses an aesthetic richness to match
its sociopolitical complexities.
Pamuk lives in Istanbul, in the same apartment building in the
Nicantaci district his father and uncle built in 1951. Shafak splits
her time between Tucson and Turkey. She writes in two languages and
calls neither her mother tongue.
But in an increasingly hybrid world, it’s individual courage, not
blood, that ought to determine allegiances — and talent that ought to
subvert them all. Brave, gifted, Elif Shafak is an international gem.
Anne Julie Wyman is a writer in Palo Alto.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
