Elif Shafak’s Bastard of Istanbul is a gentle book. It does not harry us with rushed ideas. It dips us gently into quiet realisations. The life of a family, principally three sisters and their mother. It shows a city, Istanbul, littered with sublime and beautiful things. Fragile things, surrounded by shite and detritus. The glass teacups, Zalahi has a grá for. These things always break, being too delicate for this world. Yet Zalahi doesn’t break, she grows out of the shite of this world to emerge bloody but unbowed. The Bastard is claustrophobic, the closeness of others bears down upon each of the characters. This is juxtaposed by the literal and figurative distance between characters. The physical proximity of the sisters is contrasted with the chasm of unspoken truths between them. ‘People stuck to one another to disguise their loneliness, pretending to be far more intimate than they actually were.‘. Gaps b...
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