The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Reviewed by Maureen Freely

The Times, August 11, 2007

IF YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT this book, it’s probably for the wrong reason. Eleven months ago, a group of ultranationalist lawyers prosecuted its author for insulting Turkishness. Her crime was to have allowed a fictitious character use the word “genocide”. She was acquitted and the book remains a bestseller.

But the case has caused her to be misunderstood. For The Bastard of Istanbul is not political in that sense. Nor is it concerned with Turkey’s ever more tormented war with the Armenian diaspora. It is about families and the lies and silences that shape them. Though some of the lies date back to the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide that may not be named, Shafak’s overriding interest is not history but gender.

We begin with the 19-year-old Zeliha Kazanci, striding furiously through the rain, fending off the wolfwhistlers of Istanbul as she makes her way to an abortionist. She has no doubts about her decision. The call to prayer she hears as the doctor puts her under should not affect her: Islam does not take a stand on abortion. Anyway, she is an Independent Woman with Ambitions. But, when she floats back into consciousness, she is told that she has staged a screaming fit so spectacular that the doctor did not dare to proceed. So she strides home to announce that she is pregnant and will keep the child.

She refuses to name the father. Had there been a man in the house, she might not have had her way. But the Kazanci men have a way of dying young.

The only one still living is her brother, dispatched to Arizona, to study in a place where the family curse might not reach him. So little Asya is born into a family where female eccentricity is the norm. On one side of the table are her great-grandmother, the whimsical Petite Ma, her grandmother, Gulsum (“who might have been Ivan the Terrible in another life”), and her mother, Zeliha (who now runs a tattoo parlour).

On the other side are Aunt Cevriye, the politically correct history teacher, Aunt Feride, the hypochondriac, and Aunt Banu, the clairvoyant, who has several imaginary friends.

Nineteen years on, Asya is an eccentric in her own right, skipping dance classes to hang out at the Café Kundera, and preferring the internet to sleep. This brings her into contact with a 19-year-old American named Armanoush. Her connection to Asya is Mustafa, the Kazanci son who settled in Arizona, and who is also her stepfather. A surprise visit to Istanbul soon seems like an excellent idea.

No one Armanoush meets there fits her image of the Turk. No one has the slightest problem with her being Armenian. Like their soulmates in Shafak’s earlier novel, The Flea Palace(shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2005, although this new novel was written in English), they inhabit an Istanbul where all are hybrids and misfits and one-offs and no one would have it any other way.

Theirs is a Turkishness at home with its Ottoman roots and at war with the monolithic version peddled by the nation’s patriarchs. They are at war, too, with the plot, which hangs over them like a rain-cloud. But how ingeniously they defy it. And what a pleasure it is to watch them win.

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

The Times