Comments on: The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

by: GT

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 02:00:58 +0000

Myrthe,

for me the most interesting thing in Pamuk’s book was the profound confusion of turkish as persons and as a society. I wonder if it is just Pamuk’s condition or it is really the state of affairs of Turkey. And of course I did not read it in Dutch

by: Myrthe

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:07:53 +0000

GT, I read Snow as well, and had a lot of trouble finishing it. I found Pamuk’s writing style rather annoying and found it difficult to concentrate on the writing. I’d read a page and at the end of it I’d be wondering what I had actually read and I’d be reading the same page again. I read it in Dutch and I assume you read it in a language other than Dutch. This makes me think it the problem wasn’t in the translations, but in Pamuk’s writing style. I’m generally not afraid at all to tackle ‘difficult’ books, but Snow was a special case, a book that didn’t do much with me at all.

Shafak’s book is much more accessible and I actually quite liked her writing style, her way of describing people and scenes. Shafak’s writing is very much alive with colors, smells, noise.

by: GT

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:09:17 +0000

I read Snow of Pamuk and Bastard of Istanbul by Shafak in succession. I found Pamuk to be pretentious and did not like his language at all (may be it is not his fault but translator’s).
Shafak is simpler of course, but book reads with interest. There are superfluous scenes and characters, but it is easy to forgive them considering the author is not Nobel laureate for literature.

by: Myrthe

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:25:47 +0000

Thanks for the post, Onnik. If you ever want to read the book, let me know. I have an English copy you can borrow. I also happen to have Ali and Nino on my To Be Read-pile (in Dutch, though) and once I’ve read it, I will certainly blog about it. I read Ali and Nino some years ago and at the time I liked the book. I want to reread it, though.

I do feel that The Bastard of Istanbul would have been better if the urge to represent every opinion from both sides would have been a lot less obvious. Anyway, it is still an interesting book to read.

by: Onnik

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:17:38 +0000

And talking of reviews, there are many as well as articles online:

The Bastard of Istanbul. By Elif Shafak. 360 pages. $24.95. Viking.

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.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/19/features/IDSIDE20.php

A Google search pretty much finds everything.