Elif Shafak - The Bastard of Istanbul

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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL

Elif Shafak is the author of five previous novels and a collection of essays. In Turkey she has won the Mevlana Prize for Literature as well as the Turkish Novel Award. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. She lives in Istanbul.

Praise for The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Shafaks charming, smart, and profoundly involving spinning top of a novel dramatizes the inescapability of guilt and punishment, and the inextricable entwinement of Armenians and Turks, East and West, past and present, the personal and the political. By aligning the compulsory amnesia surrounding the crimes in one family with Turkeys refusal to confront past crimes against humanity, Shafak makes the case for truth, reconciliation and remembrance.

Donna Seaman, Newsday

In a better world, Turkish writer Elif Shafak would get more attention for her zesty, imaginative writing and less for the controversy her politics stir up.... A lively look at contemporary Istanbul and family through the eyes of two young women, one Turkish and one Armenian American.

Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

Beautifully imagined... its as much family history as national history that drives this vital and entertaining novel. And its the powerful and idiosyncratic characters who drive the family history. And, as you hear in your minds ear, its Shafaks vibrant language that drives the characters. Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

The purposeful ignorance of Shafaks Turks, born out of a willing turning away from past familial horrors, becomes a symbol for the collective Turkish turning away from the horrors of the Armenian genocide. Shafak is incapable of bringing harmony to such unsettled matters, even in the pages of a fiction narrative. All she can do, and does, is shine a light on the past, and keep it shining so that everyone Turkish, Armenian, and otherwisemust look.

Saul Austerlitz, San Francisco Chronicle (front page)

Theres more going on than interfamilial melodrama, and Shafaks ambitions do not stop with an airing of Turkeys century-old dirty laundry.... In the end, Shafak resists a tidy wrap-up. She leaves most of her characters in the lurch, abandoning them midcrisis, their dilemmas only deepened with a dose of ambiguity. But how else could she leave them? The point hereand of the ugly fuss that has greeted the books publicationis that the past is never finished, never neat, and never ours.

Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times

Shafaks writing is seductive; each chapter of her novel is named for a food, and the warmth of the Turkish kitchen lies at the center of its wide-ranging plot. The Bastard of Istanbul portrays family as more than merely a function of genetics and fate, folding together history and fiction, the personal and the political into a thing of beauty. Jennifer Gerson, Elle

A deftly spun tale of two familiesone Armenian American and the other Turkishwho are burdened by dark secrets and historical tragedies rooted in a common Istanbul past. Amberin Zaman, The Economist

Rich and satisfying... a vital reminder of historys hold on us, of how the past can still control the present... Shafaks prose is rich with telling detail and witty description. Moira McDonald, The Seattle Times

A brave, ambitious book... Shafak has used the familiar form of the diaspora family saga as an asbestos glove with which to grasp the afterlife of the Armenian catastrophe. Her novel features the requisite cast of colorful female characters, elaborately described meals, fragments of folktales.... Shafak is careful to sketch in the different shades of Turkish defensiveness, as well as to consider what responsibility we bear for our fathers crimes, especially when the wound has outlived the perpetrators. Maria Margaronis, The Nation

Bold and raggedly beautiful ... although this book is crowded with characters, its most vivid one is not one of the Kazanci matriarchs but Istanbul itself. It is a city plagued by ghosts, talking and thronged to the extreme but notable for what it is silent about. John Freeman, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Through her characters Shafak examines how the stories we love and the stories we tell become who we are. Her writing is beautiful and meaningful and will astound you as you find the many ways to claim the story as, also, your own.... This is an important book about forgetting, about retelling stories, about denial, about not knowing your past, about knowing your past, and about choosing (again and again) to start over. Sherrie Flick, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A fast paced story of love, loss, and coincidence. Shafak writes powerfully of war (cultural and familial), of peace and the meaning of moral fortitude. She possesses a steady hand when it comes to creating strong female characters, and her vivid descriptions of the charms of Istanbul serve to lure the traveler.... Shafaks characters linger in the mind days after finishing the book.

Patricia Corrigan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Mixing humor and tragedy as effortlessly as her two unforgettable families blend and jumble up the many layers of their identity, Elif Shafak offers up an extravagant tale of Istanbul and Arizona, food and remorse, mysticism and tattoos, human comedy and yes, massacres. Quite an exceptional literary feast. Ariel Dorfman

The preamble to a Turkish tale ... and to an Armenian one

Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it.

That includes the rain.

No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how icy the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the heavens might have in store for us. Everybody knows this. And that includes Zeliha.

Yet, there she was on this first Friday of July, walking on a sidewalk that flowed next to hopelessly clogged traffic; rushing to an appointment she was now late for, swearing like a trooper, hissing one profanity after another at the broken pavement stones, at her high heels, at the man stalking her, at each and every driver who honked frantically when it was an urban fact that clamor had no effect on unclogging traffic, at the whole Ottoman dynasty for once upon a time conquering the city of Constantinople, and then sticking by its mistake, and yes, at the rain... this damn summer rain.

Rain is an agony here. In other parts of the world, a downpour will in all likelihood come as a boon for nearly everyone and everythinggood for the crops, good for the fauna and the flora, and with an extra splash of romanticism, good for lovers. Not so in Istanbul though. Rain, for us, isnt necessarily about getting wet. Its not about getting dirty even. If anything, its about getting angry. Its mud and chaos and rage, as if we didnt have enough of each already. And struggle. Its always about struggle. Like kittens thrown into a bucketful of water, all ten million of us put up a futile fight against the drops. It cant be said that we are completely alone in this scuffle, for the streets too are in on it, with their antediluvian names stenciled on tin placards, and the tombstones of so many saints scattered in all directions, the piles of garbage that wait on almost every corner, the hideously huge construction pits soon to be turned into glitzy, modern buildings, and the seagulls.... It angers us all when the sky opens and spits on our heads.