The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak (Viking Adult, 368 pages)This week, the Western gaze turned once again to Turkey when a journalist of Armenian descent and champion of the Armenian cause was shot and killed outside of his office in Istanbul. At his funeral days later, tens of thousands of mourners gathered in what turned out to be an informal display of unity between the two ethnic groups (both heavily in attendance). The murder and resulting public displays are causing more than a little strife for the progressive Muslim country, which the European Union still watches as it tries to finagle its way into their predominately Christian club while dodging questions about its spotty human rights record.
But let us not forget the pesky issue of the Armenian genocide in 1915, which never fully entered the international community's collective memory but is rippling through Turkey's national consciousness with new force. Though undisputed by historians and widely discussed in scholarly circles, public attention on Turkey's bloody past is only beginning to grow, largely due to the efforts of artists and writers.
Quite a fare for the Turkish novelist, burdened both by the perils of Turkish identity in the aftermath of unmentionable atrocities and a host of nationalist laws prohibiting the expression of these very burdens. The Bastard of Istanbul, Turkish writer Elif Shafak's new novel (her second in English), takes on the formidable task of creating a literary space roomy enough for Turks, Armenians, and Americans to wander through together. They will, of course, be hauling along -- with varying degrees of finesse -- their respective ethnic baggage.
In the post-Cold War age of disappearing borders and roiling ethnic conflict, issues of identity, nationality, and migration have featured prominently in literature, and for good reason. Younger writers seem particularly interested in chronicling and exploring the new globalized self, and have generated an imaginative canon to capture their curiosities.
Shafak, however, seems to be banking solely on her political courage (she was prosecuted in 2006 for "insulting Turkishness," a charge that was later dismissed) to earn her a place within a well-established niche of fiction writers, among them Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gary Shteyngart. Yet it is clear early on that her courage, while honorable, is not enough. Shafak fumbles her unique entry point into the broader nationality discourse and attempts to write an epic when she should have written an essay. The Bastard of Istanbul's ambitious mission is quickly undone by trite dialogue and dull details that drag the narrative down. Shafak maintains coherence while navigating among a large number of characters spanning both generations and continents, but her story feels trifling and cluttered, as if an imitator's exercise in the frenetics of contemporary prose.
At the outset, we learn the that the men of the novel's central Kazanci family have fallen to tragic circumstances, leaving only an estranged brother, sent to America early on and rarely heard from again. Thus, a decidedly female tone is in place from the beginning. We meet Zelihah, a rebellious (that is, short skirt-wearing) girl in Istanbul, who will eventually give birth to Asya, the title character. Living with a group of zany, overprotective aunts, Asya skulks around the city alternately lecturing and boring the reader with a mess of freshman philosophy and discussions of Turkish social mores. Attempts at literary know-how, not to mention heavy-handed exposition, are blatant throughout: "Now Asya averted her eyes so as not to have to stare any longer at her mother, the mother whom she had never called 'mom' and had perhaps hoped to keep at a distant by 'auntifying.'" Shafak herself makes too many appearances like this, nervously making sure that her shtick is not lost upon us.
Asya will later meet her Armenian-American counterpart, a bookish girl named Armanoush, thusly described: "First and foremost, Armanoush was beautiful -- too beautiful." This is a puzzling and adolescent characterization from the feminist Shafak, whose language is generally far too limited to keep her heroines afloat. The strength of these women is crucial to the book's success, since such effort went into establishing them as the central storytellers. When Armanoush travels to Turkey to spread the Armenian message and reconnect with some distant family members, she wonders: "How could she break free from her genetic heritage, especially when a part of her was so proud of it?." Shafak should know better than to push such a tired thematic angle, and to do it so unartfully. The intellectual and emotional limits of these two characters leave Bastard trailing behind the rest of the genre, which, in others' hands, has by now progressed considerably beyond thematic reliance on the initial shocks of nationality and the self.
There is much at play in Turkey, straddled as it is between many opposing divides -- Eastern tradition and Western influence, pre-modern empire and democratic republic, religious observance and secular culture. It's more than enough to color a novelized Istanbul in different shades. Shafak dotes on urban detail, though she mercifully stops short of the awkward "the city as main character" motif. Indeed, there is enough that works in this book that dialogue like this becomes all the more disappointing:
"The music you listen to is so Western. Why don't you listen to your Middle Eastern roots?"Shafak misses an important opportunity to uncover the richness of these two young women's experiences, and the reader seems to be left with an even more bifurcated sense of things than is likely intended. Little insight is gained from this interminable chatter, which will eventually tie up loose ends but do so with little flair. Bastard's final twist, the revelation of Asya's father's identity, reads like a last attempt at fireworks -- it too fizzles.
"What do you mean?" Asya sounded perplexed. "We [Turks] are Western."
"No, you are not Western. Turks are Middle Eastern but somehow in constant denial. And if you had let [Armenians] stay in our homes, we too could still be Middle Easterners instead of turning into a diaspora people."
"What do you mean?"
"What do I mean? I mean, Sultan Hamid's Pan-Turkish and Pan Islamic yoke. I mean, the 1909 Adana massacres or the 1915 deportations ... Do those ring a bell?"
The chapter titles are each named a different type of food, linking together the sometimes-evocative culinary vignettes throughout the book. Food appears in almost every social setting, lovingly described, elemental to personal and family life. In this thread there is the flicker of artistic promise, a nod to the depths that good storytelling must reach. Such big social-agenda novels need these kinds of knotty patches of texture to make them whole. Otherwise, they are textbooks in all but appearance.
Erica Lipper, a former Prospect intern, is a graduate student at Georgetown University.
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