"The bastard of Istanbul" (by Elif Shafak)

The Bastard of Istanbul is a 2006 novel by Turkish bestselling female author Elif Şafak, written originally in English and published by Viking Adult. It was translated by Aslı Biçen into her native language Turkish under the title Baba ve Piç in March 2006, and became a bestseller.

In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya’s mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbul is a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction.
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The bastard of Istanbul arrives already weighed down by baggage. Written in English, the novel was published first in Turkey, in translation, where it rapidly became a bestseller. Its author, Elif Shafak, was accused by the Turkish government of 'insulting Turkishness' and could have been the first writer to be jailed in Turkey for fictitious words spoken by an invented person. In the event, the charges were thrown out but Shafak's first pregnancy was overshadowed by the possibility of a three-year prison term. The incident generated international concern.
So much for the brouhaha; what of the book? This is a cluttered carpetbag of a novel, crammed with characters and themes, not unlike Istanbul itself. But what might be invigorating in a city can, in a novel, be a bit bewildering. Towards the end I found myself drawing a family tree of the characters in an attempt to get the convoluted relationships straight in my head. (Shafak and her publishers can't provide this service themselves because the revelation of these relationships is the meat of the novel.)
In the first five chapters, rather like Robert Altman in Short Cuts, Shafak presents a series of disconnected scenes and characters that may, possibly, we hope, eventually cohere. This may work better in film than in a novel: by page 80 or so I was starting to feel frustrated at having to gird myself for the fifth change of focus. Did the young woman in Istanbul who failed to have an abortion have anything to do with the American housewife? Why had we jumped 19 years? Were any of these characters going to step forward and require some sustained emotional input?
Fortunately, around one-third of the way through, the two central figures, 19-year-old cousins Asya and Armanoush, one Turkish, one Armenian-American, finally meet in Istanbul and start talking about memory, identity, the wilful ignorance of the Turks of the massacres of Armenians in 1915, and whether the past can be shaken off, which are evidently the issues that Shafak really wants her readers to think about.

The trouble is that these poor girls are often overwhelmed by the book's political intent. Asya and Armanoush talk unlike any normal 19 year olds; even clever girls surely don't sound quite so relentlessly like an essay. The other characters are typically distinguished by a couple of salient features - sensible history teacher, miniskirted tattooist - as if they are there for a higher purpose, and a sketch will have to do.
Sometimes Shafak caves in completely under the need for symbolic weight, and refers to her characters simply by what they stand for - the Closeted Gay Columnist, the Non-nationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies (which feels a bit like being beaten round the head: we've already spotted that in Istanbul people often have to conceal their true identities). Most troubling of all, Mustapha, Asya's uncle and Armanoush's stepfather, whose actions are central to the plot, remains an enigma.
The magical realist descriptions of Istanbul and Asya's home are powerful: these are places where djinns comfortably coexist with the Turkish version of The Apprentice. And the passages about the deportations and massacres of Armenians are shocking, as Armanoush finds a city and a country in denial about the genocide, and attempts to make her cousins understand how much the past conditions the present.There's plenty of plot, too, even if it does mostly come in the final third. And there's no doubt that the book is clever, thick with ideas and themes and politics. Clogged, even: there were times when I could have done with fewer characters and rather less whimsical description.
The book is important for having drawn attention to the massacres and to the Turks' ambivalence about them, and for what it has exposed about freedom of speech. It's unquestionably an ambitious book, exuberant and teeming. But, perhaps because of the sometimes florid writing, reading it feels like holding a sack from which 20 very angry cats are fighting to escape.
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There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet denial’s practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government calls the butchers of Darfur “self-defense militias.” The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as “myth.” In an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914 and 1918 as “relocations” with “some untoward incidents.”

It seems obvious that the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak smells the rot in her homeland. Indeed, “The Bastard of Istanbul,” her sixth novel and the second written in English, recently led to a suit by the right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak’s Armenian characters were “insulting Turkishness” by referring to the “millions” of Armenians “massacred” by “Turkish butchers” who “then contentedly denied it all.” Earlier, Kerincsiz sued Turkey’s best-known novelist, the Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, for telling a Swiss journalist that “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

Pamuk’s isolation is less than complete and his stance not entirely daring. Kerincsiz and others have brought about 60 similar cases, a majority concerning the Armenian genocide, and not one has resulted in prison time. Kerincsiz, who helps organize demonstrations to coincide with the court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union, and he acknowledges that these circus displays of his country’s censorship laws aid his cause.

Although the international literary community has rallied behind Pamuk and Shafak, both of whose cases were dismissed, there has been decidedly less clamor about the suits brought against Turkish-Armenian journalists, underpaid translators and long-standing political activists. At the same time, Turkish nationalists have charged that Pamuk’s Nobel and Shafak’s place in the spotlight have had more to do with their persecution than with the merits of their work.

The critical consensus on Pamuk is undeniably strong, that on Shafak far less substantial. Most of her novels have not been reviewed in the West, and with the recent uproar she has become more discussed than read. In this new book, she has taken on a subject of deep moral consequence. But is the work worthy of its subject?

“The Bastard of Istanbul,” set in the United States and Turkey, concerns two families — one Turkish, living in Istanbul, and the other Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco. (Shafak is currently an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Arizona; she commutes between Tucson and Istanbul.)

An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It’s no surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the center of the plot, is more of an enigma than a character. First seen in a Tucson supermarket as a college student, he falls for and soon marries a young American who has recently divorced her Armenian husband. Not only does his new wife enjoy offending her Armenian in-laws with a Turkish spouse, she also relishes the idea that her baby daughter will have a Turkish stepfather.

That child, Armanoush, endures shuttle parenting, moving between her mother in Arizona and her father and his relatives in San Francisco. Shafak sketches these Armenians flatly and superficially, as uniformly and fiercely anti-Turk — and as overprotectively fretful about beautiful and bookish Armanoush. Instead of exploring her roots with her own survivor family, she makes contact with Armenian-Americans online, joining a chat group dedicated to intellectual issues, including combating Turkish denial of the massacres. At 21, Armanoush somewhat illogically decides to travel to Istanbul, where none of her Armenian relatives remain. She stays with her stepfather’s Turkish family while keeping her mother and father ignorant of her whereabouts.

The family this young woman encounters is a confusing swirl of four generations of women that includes a great-grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease; a disapproving, distant and angry grandmother; her four daughters and one great-granddaughter. The eldest daughter is a self-styled Muslim mystic; another is a high-school teacher, and yet another a schizophrenic who lives in a fantasy world. The youngest runs a tattoo parlor and has an illegitimate daughter, the bastard of the novel’s title.

Keeping all these women straight isn’t crucial since they function chiefly as adornments of Shafak’s magic realism, the inhabitants of a supernatural personal history. We learn, for example, that the men of the family for “generations after generations ... had died young and unexpectedly,” a contrivance that explains why Mustafa is living in Tucson and has never returned to Istanbul to see his four sisters.

Armanoush’s visit, which begins as an impulsive spurt of tourism, unexpectedly leads to a far darker explanation of her stepfather’s exile. (Those who wish to read the novel and not have the ending spoiled should stop here.) She inadvertently helps reveal Mustafa’s secret — that he raped his youngest sister, that this sister covered up for him and that her child is a product of incest. It takes the mystic sister, with the help of an evil djinni, to bring about both her brother’s death and his daughter’s discovery of her origins.

Mustafa’s crime is meant, presumably, to symbolize Turkey’s long-denied history of genocide. But the fate of the Armenians is by no means obscure. In fact, scholars around the world have documented it with precision. Unlike the members of the Armenian diaspora, Mustafa’s sister willfully hides the circumstances of her rape — although it’s difficult to believe that this miniskirted, high-heeled, radically irreverent woman would have engaged in such subterfuge.

When the novel’s skeleton finally dances out of its flimsy closet, it’s clear that although Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction she has yet to become — in English, at any rate — a good novelist. A valuable moment in the klieg lights has been squandered, but Shafak, still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer whose artistry matches her ambition.