Skip to main content

The Bastard of Istanbul

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 between people so close together and yet forced apart by their histories, by their identities, and the taboos and strictures of an oppressive society and of course by their own unspeakable sins. 


The Bastard shows us that an oppressive society isn’t oppressive on some abstract level.  It isn’t a thing out there. It reaches down into the daily lives and perverts every conversation. It obstructs sincere contact.  Zalahi reflects, ‘ Why can't I share a cigarette and a few friendly words with this man?’  The millstone of convention is placed around Zalahi neck and she must carry this into the most mundane of human interaction, like getting a light for a fag.   It is an oppression which reaches into private lives and robs them of their authenticity.  This is the oppression that the Bastard shows so clearly. 


Elif’s characters are made endearing by the inclusion of their foibles.  Impulse buys in a supermarket, loyalty to a particular brand of tissues. If details are the soul of narrative, then these details render three-dimensional characters. 


The threads which connect families, cultures and places are strong themes here too.  The touches and tidy gestures, that show daily care and consideration for one another. The peeled orange left for the returning daughter. 


The Bastard challenges the naive insistence on the difference between nationalities and ethnicities. Showing these vanities of small difference for the idiocy they are.


Almost unbelievable, Elif Shafak was put on trial for 'denigrating Turkishness' following the publication of the book.  Fortunately she was not convicted.  The Bastard exalts the beauty of Turkish, Armenian and human lives.  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. A review and some thoughts.

Dale Carnegie's 1936, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' has remaining in continuous print since 1936, selling over 30 million copies.  Something is selling here.  Carnegie has distilled a distinct ideology one deeply ingrained in the Western corporate world’s ethos of mandatory optimism.  While Carnegie's insights are not inherently flawed, their luminescence casts a particularly dense umbra. Carnegie's book aligns with something we know about ourselves, echoing George Orwell's observation: 'The best books tell you what you already know.' The book plays into our innate longing for acceptance and affirmation, fostering a confirmation bias where we gravitate towards ideas that affirm our pre-existing beliefs. Reading Carnegie I could not help thinking of it's antithesis. Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' (1949) delves into the perilous consequences of such biases.  Willy Loman, epitomises the tragic fallout of conflating charm,...
Post a Comment
Read more

American Pastoral, American Berserk

This is a beautiful book, rendered in exquisite prose. If all of life is light and shadow, then American Pastoral shies neither from the light nor the shadow. It shows us unconditional parental love and the callous indifference of our societies at large. It takes a cold hard look at the essential contradictions in American society, and in doing so, is an essential autopsy of the American Dream. The central theme I took from the novel is that it asks what went wrong? How can our loved ones be capable of such terrible things? However, unlike other novels that have asked similar questions, I am thinking of 'We need to talk about Kevin’. by Lionel Shriver. Roth considers the interesting angle of having a familial relationship as almost entirely loving. With parents painstakingly, human, even superhuman. And yet, these horrors still enters their lives. Leaving us to wonder what causes this to go wrong. Roth shows how the political is personal, brushing your teeth is political...
Post a Comment
Read more

Half of a Yellow Sun a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was inspired to pick up this book after listening to Chimamanda's 2022 Reith Lectures on the Freedom of Speech. Chimamanda, argues that it feels like freedom of speech is under attack. She names cancel culture, arguments about “wokeness" (I am old enough to remember when we called this political correctness) and the stabbing of Salman Rushdie as producing this atmosphere. Meanwhile, autocrats, populists and an anti-science identity culture have undermined the very notion of an accepted fact-based truth which lives above politics. So how do we calibrate freedom in this context? 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' is as profoundly human, as it is unsettling. The terror and the domestic are cheek by jowl. They live side by side, in the same spaces. I have heard it said that Iris Murdoch's contribution to ethics is that she (along with other feminist philosophers) reframed ethics from the public to the intimate. Similarly, Adichie's narrative highlights that ethics canno...
Post a Comment
Read more