TURKEY’S OLD CRIMES REFUSE TO STAY BURIED
by Elif Shafak

Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2007
United Kingdom

If Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, the two best-known Turkish novelists in
the English-speaking world, have one virtue in common, it is that both
have dedicatedly interrogated their country’s self-image, contrasting
the narrowness of ?Turkism with the cosmopolitanism of the old Ottoman
empire. Both have gone on trial, too, under an infamous article of
the Turkish Penal Code, for the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’.

In terms of their viewpoints there is not much to choose between
them. Shafak’s latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, shows her though
to be a more attack-minded and less sophisticated novelist than her
Nobel Prize-winning contemporary.

advertisementThe novel drives the distant past into the path of
the heedless present through a multi-generational narrative, and it
addresses explicitly a controversial episode in Turkish history, the
massacre of perhaps a million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915-16.

The bastard of Istanbul is Asya Kazanci, the illegitimate child of
one of four headstrong sisters who live together as one family –
the Kazanci men having an unfortunate habit of dying young. Asya does
not know who her father is and has been taught not to bother to try
and find out; she is similarly indifferent to her country’s history.

The single living Kazanci man, Asya’s uncle Mustapha, has settled in
America and married a divorcee of Armenian descent. When Mustapha’s
step-daughter, Armanoush, arrives suddenly in Istanbul in search of her
family’s roots, the Kazanci women are forced to accept the truth that
the novel dramatises, which is that ‘the past is anything but bygone’.

Shafak’s double-sided narrative demonstrates how the Armenian diaspora
and the Turkish people live in different time frames, one still nursing
the wounds of old crimes, the other living in a present that accepts
no responsibility for the past.

Yet it could be said that Shafak’s novel is, on balance, not all that
novelistic. Its characters lack true freedom and interiority and can
seem mere symbols or meanings fitted into an overarching structure.

Indeed part of the problem, it might be said, rests less with Shafak’s
theory of character here than with her choice of language.

Shafak is that rarity, a bilingual novelist, and this is her second
novelin English. But sentences such as: ‘If her passion for books had
been one fundamental reason behind her recurring inability to sustain
a standard relationship with the opposite sex?…’ raise doubts about
whether even a novelist as gifted as she is possesses the understanding
and intuition to novelise successfully her undeniably powerful ideas
in two languages.