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Literary Review
FICTION
The burden of memory
PRIYA KRISHNAN
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A timely story about shared histories and differing truths.
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The Bastard of Istanbul; Elif Shafak, Viking/Penguin, £11.99.
If you are in the mood for a hearty novel about tangled families teeming with eccentric, rebellious women, with a pace that is unrelenting, then this one’s for you. It is also tempered by disturbing insights into memory and ‘forgottenR
17; history. That makes it even more compelling.
In this, only her second novel in English, Turkish writer, Elif Shafak splices together the tumultuous histories of an Armenian-American family in the USA and a Turkish-Muslim one in Istanbul, against the backdrop of Turkey’s violent past. Given that this novel spans different worlds and generations, she gets her characters’ lives to intersect, seamlessly.
Asya, 19 years old and born out of wedlock, loves café life, Johnny Cash’s music and existentialism. She lives in an old mansion in Istanbul with three generations of women of the Kazanci family — her mother Zeliha, three aunts, a grandmother and a step-great-grandmother. And if you are wondering about men…well, the author keeps Asya’s uncle, Mustafa, a man who is central to the plot, distant. He lives in the U.S. He is married to an American divorced from her Armenian husband and becomes stepfather to Armanoush Tchakmakchian, her daughter from the first marriage.
In the anonymity of Café Constantinopolis, a chat room where the emotional and intellectual lives of people are bared and shared, Armanoush exchanges thoughts with other Armenians on Turkey’s denial of the one million Armenian massacres during Ottoman rule.
Connect with the past
Unknown to her immediate family, Armanoush’s quest to connect with her grandma’s past, “to meet Turks to better absorb what it means to be an Armenian,” brings her to Istanbul. But why she doesn’t try to delve into her own family’s history before she jets off to a city where no one remains from her Armenian family, defies logic. In the midst of the odd but endearing bunch of Kazanci women, she ends up with a good friend in Asya and uncovers dark secrets that link the two clans. We also learn that generations of men haven’t survived in the family. That seems to explain Mustafa’s ‘exile’. What also strikes one as odd is that a defiant, modern Zeliha remains silent about a heinous crime.
Apart from these jarring notes and Armanoush’s contrived visit, to suit the purpose of engaging with the contentious events of 1915, Shafak is at her perceptive best when exploring at the personal and the political levels, “the battle of memory against amnesia”. Asya grapples with the frustration of not knowing who her father is and envies her Petite-Ma who has Alzheimer’s. “Memory withers away…it might not be good for the people around you, but it’s good for you,” she observes, wryly.
She also speaks of why Armenians remember. It’s because “your crusade for remembrance makes you part of a group where there is a great feeling of solidarity”, whereas “Turks like me cannot be past-oriented not because I don’t care but because I don’t know anything about it.”
Searing evocation
Heart-wrenching truths echo through the pages. Shafak, who also inhabits the world of words, searingly evokes what imagination means to a minority “a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined to be always silenced.” Which brings us to her recent battles and victory over Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which prohibits “public denigration of Turkishness”. She remains undaunted.
Truth hurts but she gets her characters to find similarities that allow them to heal the festering wounds of memory. This she does with empathy, by seeing things from the point of view of the ‘other’. If I have a bone to pick, it is that the novel is overwritten and her attempts at magic realism are feeble and convenient, much like the end of the novel. While these hamper its appeal, Shafak’s moral scruples are spot on in a book that must be read for its conscience and wisdom, and the clutter, claustrophobia and warmth of families.
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