Financial Express
July 28, 2007 Saturday

PAMUK’S CHALLENGER?

When Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told a Swiss
journalist that "30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed
in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it," he was put
on trial for "insulting" Turkishness. Fellow novelist Elif Shafak was
put on the stands too because one of the characters in her second
English novel The Bastard of Istanbul has a family of Armenians
talking about them being "genocide survivors who lost all their
relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915" She was promptly
sued by right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who had also sued Pamuk
and a host of others for hurting Turkey’s sensibilities. Both Pamuk
and Shafak were spared of doing time in prison.

But at least in Shafak’s case, she ended up being discussed much more
than the book. And thereby hangs a tale. Shafak, who had showed a lot
of promise in her first English novel, The Flea Palace, doesn’t quite
live up to her reputation in this one. Though the premise is fiery
enough – it’s set across two countries, the US and Turkey, and
follows two families, the Turkish one living in Istanbul, and the
Armenian one living in America – and enough twists and turns
befitting a potboiler, it doesn’t necessarily convert into a good
read. But first the story. Mustafa, Turkish, studying in America
falls in love with an American, Rose, who is divorced from her
Armenian husband. Rose is particularly happy to take sweet revenge on
her Armenian in-laws because her daughter Armanoush will be brought
up by a Turkish father. When she grows up to be 21, Armanoush, who
has always been in touch with her Armenian roots, strangely wants to
go to Istanbul (but Armenians don’t live there anymore, right?). She
stays with her stepfather’s family, and stumbles onto a difficult
secret. The Turkish family of four generations, including the eldest
suffering from Alzheimer’s and the youngest running a tattoo parlour
and mother of a "bastard" daughter from where Shafak picks the title,
keeps Armanoush busy. She goes through a roller-coaster experience,
not least because of the sight and sounds of Istanbul’s streets, the
incessant shouting, bullying, haranguing that takes place there. She
learns why her stepfather has kept himself safe, till now that is, in
America – the men of the family "for generations had died young". If
Mustafa’s misdeed – he rapes his sister – is a metaphor for Turkey’s
consistent denial of genocide, it doesn’t quite work. Because thanks
to historians and the Armenian diaspora themselves, the Armenian
genocide is known. It’s not kept a secret like Mustafa’s sister does
the rape. Though Shafak fills her novel with sentences like –
"Istanbul is a hodgepodge of 10 million lives. It is an open book of
ten million scrambled stories." – she will have to do better than
this to take on Pamuk.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress