In the afterword to my edition of this book, Shafak writes briefly (very briefly) that she faced charges in Turkish courts because parts of this book were considered un-Turkish. Perhaps this is not surprising considering that the novel does deal with the relationships between Turks and Armenians, an...
The best books have a balance between language and story, between atmosphere and plot. This one came down a little too much on the side of language/atmosphere for me, for a book that's about "...a secret connection linking (two families) to a violent event in the history of their homeland." I kept t...
The best books have a balance between language and story, between atmosphere and plot. This one came down a little too much on the side of language/atmosphere for me, for a book that's about "...a secret connection linking (two families) to a violent event in the history of their homeland." I kept t...
**********SPOILER ALERT**********The “Bastard of Istanbul” has been on my to-read radar for a while now partly owing to the review of a fellow gr friend who’s read it and to my own curiosity of how these characters are going to come together to tell the story of the Armenian genocide, and how I will...
It begins (somewhat unexpectedly given the subject matter) as a fairly light-hearted comedy where most characters are cosmopolitan & polite and a little emotionally detached towards the sufferings of the past, until the big revelations towards the end, when tragedies of the past come back to haunt t...
“Family stories intermingle in such ways that what happened generations ago can have an impact on seemingly irrelevant developments of the present day. The past is anything but bygone.”Armanoush has an American mother and an Armenian father who are separated. When her mother remarried it was to Must...
Elif Shafak built these characters with distinct voices and it was so very easy for me to picture Asya stuck at the dinner table with her well-meaning nagging aunties asking about her ballet class. Armanoush flew to Istanbul on a whim and it was nice to see that she had certain assumptions (incorrec...
Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is ...
I'm really in two minds about this book. On the one hand, the writing in it is, for the most part, pretentious and overambitious: it's as if Shafak has no concept of a coherent linguistic register in English, mixing semi-academic narrative style with misplaced colloquialisms (but that is perhaps to ...
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