BOOK REVIEW: HISTORIES OF TWO FAMILIES COLLIDE IN ‘ISTANBUL’
By Kevin O’Kelly

Boston Globe, MA
Feb 27 2007

The Bastard of Istanbul, By Elif Shafak, Viking, 357 pp

Asya Kazanci, the title character in "The Bastard of Istanbul," is
19, headstrong, and sick of her family. Too bad she lives with them:
her mother Zeliha, the sexy, brassy owner of a tattoo parlor; her aunt
Banu, a psychic who mixes belief in folk magic with Islamic piety; her
aunt Cevriye, a humorless teacher of Turkish history who’s a walking
fountain of nationalist propaganda; her grandmother, Gulsum , who’s
perpetually furious at Zeliha’s failure to be anything approaching a
good Muslim; her great-grandmother, Petite-Ma , who’s succumbing to
Alzheimer’s; and lastly her aunt Feride, who’s . . .

well, just plain nuts.

With the bohemian regulars at a local bar and the music of Johnny
Cash , Asya takes refuge from her rage at being illegitimate and her
frustrations with her family.

Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian lives in Arizona and San Francisco. She’s
21, headstrong, and sick of her family. Her over protective mother
Rose is a native Kentuckian who lives in Tucson. Her good-natured
father Barsam Tchakhmakhchian is an Armenian-American who lives in
San Francisco. If Rose had her way, Armanoush (whom she calls Amy)
would never be out of her sight. If Barsam’s mother and sisters had
their heart’s desire, Armanoush would never have anything to do with
her odan (that’s Armenian for outsider) mother again. In the meantime,
the best they can do is fight over her, smother her with attention,
and (on the Armenian side of the family) push her to find a man.

Armanoush spends time online in an Armenian-American chatroom and
reads novels to find refuge from her identity conflicts and her
frustrations with her family.

Asya and Armanoush have something else in common besides difficult
families and angst: a family member. Around the time Asya was born, her
uncle Mustafa went to Arizona for college, where he met Rose shortly
after her divorce from Armanoush’s father. And they got married —
Rose knowing full well one of the best ways to horrify her Armenian
ex-in-laws would be to get involved with a Turk.

And when Armanoush has had enough — of her mother, of her father’s
family, and of not knowing who she is — she decides she needs to get
away. And she needs to know what it means to be Armenian. And to do
that she needs to go to Istanbul, where her family lived before the
1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks. So she writes to the Kazanci
family, introduces herself as Mustafa’s stepdaughter, and says she’s
flying to Istanbul and could she stay with them?

Armanoush’s visit is the tip of an emotional domino: and by the time
all the pieces have fallen, one after the other, we’ve learned how
the Kazanci and Tchakhmakhchian families are connected by the 1915
genocide and the identity of Asya’s father.

I don’t have enough space to describe everything I loved about this
book. The scenes in the Kazanci and Tchakhmakhchian households — the
family dynamics, the voices, the distinctive cultural atmospheres —
are nothing short of wonderful. "Bastard" is a great novel for female
characters — even the ones who make the briefest appearances are
rounded and whole. Reading the passages about them leaves you with
the sense of having eavesdropped on real people in their homes. But
this book is also a meditation on the importance and the burden of the
past — how to live with it and when to walk away from it. Above all,
"Bastard" is a novel about Istanbul, about loving a place until its
rhythms , smells , and colors are under your skin.