Montreal Gazette, Canada
April 7 2007

Tackling a Turkish taboo

JOEL YANOFSKY, Freelance
Published: Saturday, April 07, 2007

Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, is
hard to categorize. It includes recipes and fairy tales, excerpts
from chat lines, pronouncements by soothsayers and meditations on
Johnny Cash. It’s part chick lit, part magic realism – a domestic
comedy with tragic historical overtones.

It is, in other words, a narrative mess. It is also, for all that, a
heartfelt and courageous work of fiction. In her acknowledgments,
Shafak explains rather matter-of-factly that when the novel first
came out, she was put on trial for "denigrating Turkishness," a crime
under the Turkish penal code.

The charge, which carries a sentence of up to three years in prison,
has been levelled at other Turkish writers, including Orhan Pamuk,
last year’s Nobel laureate for literature. And while the charges are
often dropped, as they were in Shafak’s case, the point gets made. In
Turkey, some things are not open to discussion, namely the 1915
Armenian genocide.

Those who forget the past don’t always repeat it; sometimes, it’s bad
enough that they just go on forgetting it. Shafak is very good at
showing how wide and deep the collective amnesia runs in her country.
What happened to Armenians almost a century ago is taboo; it’s also
off the radar screen.

The past is another country for Turks, one of Shafak’s characters
says, and that’s even true for the mostly sympathetic Kazanci family,
most of whom live in one house in Istanbul. That household is made up
entirely of women, including Zeliha, "the youngest of four girls who
could not agree on anything but retained an identical conviction of
always being right, and feeling each had nothing to learn from others
but lots to teach."

A contentious but close-knit clan, they have their own way of coping
with unpleasant realities, past and present: to ignore them. So that
when Zeliha announces in the opening chapter that she’s pregnant, no
one bothers to ask who the father is. It’s left to the teenage Aysa,
Zeliha’s daughter and the bastard in the title, to grow up and
recognize that this nurturing female environment is also "a
nuthouse."

The Kazanci men, meanwhile, are cursed. They either die young or
disappear in order to avoid dying young, as Mustafa, the brother in
the family, has done.

Mustafa is enduring a lonely bachelorhood in the United States when
he meets a divorcee named Rose who marries him, primarily because
he’s Turkish and her ex-husband was Armenian. This is her revenge on
her meddling former in-laws, who disapprove of Turks even more than
they do of her.

One of the points Shafak makes most effectively in The Bastard of
Istanbul, her sixth novel and her second written in English, is that
despite the animosity between Turks and Armenians, the two groups are
more alike than they will admit. This is a premise dramatized when
Armanoush, Rose’s Armenian-American daughter and Mustafa’s
step-daughter, travels to Istanbul to stay with the Kazanci women and
explore her roots.

Aysa and Armanoush are the same age, and after some wariness on both
sides, they become friends. Armanoush’s obsession with the past and
Aysa’s detachment from it connects them and connects Shafak’s
conflicting themes of memory and forgetfulness.

A touching moment in the novel comes when Aysa is introduced, online,
to the members of an Armenian chat group. Aysa is shocked, at first,
by the anger directed at her for being a Turk.

But she also surprises her correspondents by being honest with
herself and them. "If I had a chance to know more about my past, even
if it were sad, would I choose to know it or not?" Aysa asks, adding:
"Tell me, what can I as an ordinary Turk in this day and age do to
ease your pain?"

But simple, poignant moments like this get lost as the story becomes
increasingly cluttered with out-of-the-blue plot twists. For
instance, there’s no warning early on of the pivotal role Mustafa
will play. Flashbacks to the events of 1915, though eloquently
written, also feel forced – more like an obligation than a seamless
part of the narrative.

The Bastard of Istanbul, like the city it so lovingly and candidly
describes, is a hodgepodge of old and new, hope and despair and,
appropriately, delights and misfires. Shafak ends up packing the
novel with more than she probably needs to, but, given Istanbul’s
rich, complicated and often overlooked history, it’s hard to blame
her.

Joel Yanofsky is a Montreal writer.

– – –

The Bastard of Istanbul
By Elif Shafak
Viking, 360 pages, $31
From: Baghdasarian