Cornucopia – September 2005
Parallel Universe By Andrew Finkel
(Reviewed in Cornucopia No 34)
The Saint of Incipient Insanities by Elif Shafak, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages.


The Saint of Incipient Insanities confirms Elif Shafak’s membership of a new wave of Turkish literary and artistic figures who travel unencumbered across cultural boundaries. It is her fifth novel, her second to appear in English but the first to be written in English, having made its perverse way to the Turkish bestseller list in Turkish translation.

The Saint of Incipient Insanities is set in its own peculiar universe without frontiers, that of the international student flat-share in Boston where three postgraduates, from Turkey, Morocco and Spain, try (and mostly fail) to make sense of love and life as they quest for the grail of a doctoral degree. Just as the “world” in “world music” is more than the sum of it constituent nationalities, the world of international studentdom is an alternative reality, and Shafak speaks its lingua franca of exile and hope and of no longer being able to explain who you are. The Turkish retranslation of the title is the much simpler Araf, which means purgatory or “the land in between”.

Shafak’s first novel translated into English is The Flea Palace, a picaresque journey through modern Turkey told through the interconnecting stories of the residents of a down-on-its luck apartment block in Istanbul. The Saint has no such obvious conceit on which to turn and is a book crowded with incident rather than one momentous plot. In a less structurally formal way than with The Flea Palace, Shafak turns to each of her cast of characters, gently picks them up, dusts them off and sets them down again. She has no villains and she displays enough sympathy for her cast to leave at least some of their mysteries intact. The stories are by turns funny and bleak, like an episode of Friends written by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Every now and then we feel she is winding up the plot for a major set piece, but Shafak always steps back. She tells her stories quickly and with the skill to introduce farce when we are expecting the worst, and poignancy when we ache for comic relief. If the book has a protagonist, it is the Turkish political scientist Omer Sipahioglu, whose first act of surrender in America, like Shafak (Þafak) herself, is abandoning the diacritical marks in the spelling of his name (Ömer Sipahio€lu). He tries to give up his drunken philandering as he loses his heart to an American woman. We are first introduced to her as Gail, but it turns out this is just one of her many guises. Even more than Omer and his flatmates, with their odd-coloured passports, she is the professional outsider, not just in her own country but in her own body, being unable to hold onto her own name, her sexual inclination or her desire to go on living for very long. She runs through a host of self-deceptions until there is nothing left to deceive.

It is not just a ferocious competence in a language that is not her native tongue that makes it difficult to pin a national identity on Shafak. She deliberately refuses to pander to any expectation of what a female Turkish author should be about. She teases those expectations with her insider’s ear for the idiom of Boston’s counter-cultural streets, then becomes the outsider to rail against everyday absurdities or to turn up the volume into a comic rant at, for example, the faux-lyrical descriptions of colours on a paint chart. She is at her best, however, when displaying the old-fashioned, Trollope-like virtue of stripping away pretensions.

If I speak of Shafak as being part of a “school”, it is a loose association of those whose Turkishness is not incidental to who they are but who feel no pressure to represent that Turkishness abroad or to slot it into a foreign idiom. By the same token they are not cultural missionaries importing the newest artistic creed to the folks back home. There are comparisons to be made between Shafak’s odd couple in The Saint of Incipient Insanities and the punk lovers in director Fatih Akõn’s film Gegen die Wand (Head On).

A journey to Istanbul plays a role in the dénouement of both works. For Gail it is the true abroad from which there can be no return; for Akõn’s star-crossed Cahit and Sibel it is the last chance to come home. Akõn’s story is sadder, his characters desperate and violent, miserable when they learn to be articulate. Shafak’s characters are wise, pampered and epigrammatic. Yet hers is the more disturbing tale.

Another common denominator of this new Turkish wave is that it is not obsessed with exile and return. It is the difference between Gastarbeitung and transhumance. Shafak’s voice is not that of a previous generation in search of its own identity but of one trying to cope with the realisation that it may never find it and learning to embrace the road.