The Globe and Mail (Canada)
May 26, 2007 Saturday
BOOK REVIEW; FICTION; Pg. D14
Turkey, Armenia, Arizona
by RANDY BOYAGODA
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL
By Elif Shafak
Viking Canada, 360 pages, $31
Imagine, for a moment, that the government of Turkey weren’t so
monolithic in denying the Armenian genocide of 1915, and that its
national identity was mature enough to sustain criticisms rather than
criminalizing them. Were this the case, it’s likely you would have
never heard of Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.
Alas, official Turkey remains very much committed to its repressive
ideologies, which means you probably know something of this novel and
its author.
With its many bold references to the 1915 Armenian genocide, and its
caustic presentation of Turkish denials, The Bastard of Istanbul
resulted in Shafak being charged with "insulting Turkishness" after
its publication in Turkey last year. Her predicament became an
international news story and the charges were eventually dropped, but
of late, with the North American release of the novel, she has been
garnering a great deal of media attention once again. And while this
attention matches the immediate political significance of what Shafak
has written, it almost completely contradicts this book’s merit as a
work of serious literature.
A novel with chapter titles named after various foods, with actual
recipes included in its pages, with the majority of its action set in
a house where mothers, daughters, sisters and widows live and laugh
and cry and cook together, announces itself with a certain Joy Luck
familiarity these days. The Bastard of Istanbul concerns the lives of
a matriarchal Istanbul family whose men seem to die off by the age of
40. With the family’s only living male residing in faraway Arizona,
the women of the Kazanci family busy themselves in their Istanbul
home with each other’s business and with raising the mercurial Asya,
the product of a dark sexual encounter between Zeliha, one of the
four sisters, and an unknown man. At 19, Asya has penchants for
continental philosophy and ill-considered affairs, which together
inform her more general desire to rebel against a stifling Turkish
society.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, Mustafa Kazanci marries a divorced white woman
with an Armenian daughter, Armanoush, who’s interested in learning
more about her family’s past and about the tragic history of the
Armenians in modern Turkey.
A rebel in her own right, Armanoush secretly travels to Istanbul and
stays with the Kazanci women; she impresses them with her knowledge
of the names for local cuisine and strikes up a friendship with Asya.
Armanoush soon shares with Asya her knowledge of the Armenian
genocide, which inspires Asya to rethink the patriotic assumptions of
her intellectual companions and to start calling for a more
self-exacting conversation about the national past. Asya’s journey to
Istanbul also initiates a chain of domestic events that brings to
light the Kazanci family’s complicity in the trials of Armanoush’s
Armenian grandmother and, climactically, reveals an exceptionally
awful truth about the identity of Asya’s father. The novel’s
paralleling of private and public acts of denial and concealment is
arresting; were one to follow out the implications to their end, it
would suggest the unnaturalness and violence of the act that banished
Armenians from the landscape of modern Turkey.
Moreover, the novel provides intelligent meditations on enduring the
burdens of the past, and on rights and responsibilities that carry
across ethnicities, generations and continents.
But these goods are entirely overwhelmed by the novel’s didacticism,
and by its bad, bad prose. Shafak wrote the book in English, so
there’s no translator to blame for lines such as, "Auntie Feride
sniffed, instantly integrating the nervous man into her engulfing and
egalitarian cosmos of hebrephrenic schizophrenia"; or, "He was a
fragile heart, a gullible soul, and a walking slice of chaos"; or,
"Matt Hassinger put his arm around her and whispered: ‘Pistachios …
yes, you smell just like pistachios’ "; or, "But here she was,
galloping full speed directly into the nub of the matter."
And when the book’s not galloping toward its various nubs, it’s given
over to tirades of too-open intent, as in one character’s lament
about Armanoush being raised by a Turkish stepfather: "What will that
innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? … 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!"
The sarcastic tone employed here, like the various framings and
ostensible debates that Shafak provides elsewhere when discussing the
events of 1915, is not developed enough to counteract the obvious
fact that this is a book that’s been written not about, but entirely
against, a historical injustice. While writing a well-intentioned,
passionate provocation in the form of a novel may be an act of great
courage, it doesn’t always make for great literature.
Randy Boyagoda is a professor at Ryerson University and the author of
Governor of the Northern Province.