The Cartland of Istanbul

[muckefuck]

Having forced myself to finish The bastard of Istanbul, I now have some appreciation how Elif Şafak got to be the best-selling female author in Turkey despite being a mediocre talent. I had an inkling about page 40 that this was not at all the book I was hoping it would be, but somewhere I came up with the rule that you should read at least 100 pages of a novel before passing judgment. At that point, I was nearly a third of the way through and thought, "Maybe it will get good once the shit starts to hit the fan." But the skillless handling of the first confrontation between the parallel protagonists at page 160 put paid to those hopes. Yet somehow I forced my way through another hundred pages of mawkish storytelling until some actual payoff came in sight and then I took advantage of a day spent at home with my episodically recurring mystery flu (probably just an allergy flare) to plow on till the end.

The set-up is promising: Complexly intertwined family histories bring an Armenian-American girl to an all-female household in Istanbul for a Date with Destiny. But the execution is continually undermined by a host of flaws, most notably a lack of faith in the reader which drives Şafak to explain too much, again and again. And yet, at other times, she's irritatingly vague, most glaringly whenever she puts literary comparisons into the mind of the more bookish of her protagonists. A woman and a boy on a ferry are "like Flannery O'Connor characters". Five pages later, a gathering in a café "evoked a scene out of a Kundera novel". Which scene in which novel? Now, if she got that specific, she'd be leaving out all her readers who haven't read any Kundera, and that wouldn't be very nice. This way all of us with just a foggy notion of who he is can pause at recognising the name and feel smart.

Isn't there a writerly prohibition against name-dropping much better writers, lest your audience begin to ask themselves why they're reading you instead of them? Early on, after meeting the cast of Wacky Relatives populating that konak in Istanbul, there's a mention of García Márquez. For a moment, a vision opened for me of where she could take this story which would vindicate the playful tone in which she'd cataloged the quirks of her sprawling cast. But by the time a bit of magical realism does appear (at the midpoint of the novel), it's too little too late. I'd already been introduced to an equally unwieldy and improbable collection of Wacky Relatives in a house on Russian Hill and my patience was all worn thin.

When a scifi novel had weak characterisation or a dull plot but was crammed with interesting gadgets and arresting notions, princeofcairo would tell me it was worth reading "for the chrome". Since I love the idea of travelling more than making the arrangements (let alone paying for them), fiction is my favourite passport. So I don't mind reading middling novels for the shiny bits. (Or--given that I prefer those that explore the past to those that speculate about the future--for the dusty bits.) There were a few phrases (inexplicably) in Turkish or Armenian which I had fun trying to puzzle out, some fascinating personages mentioned (like Zabel Yessayan or Bülent Ersoy[*]) that I enjoyed looking up, and lots and lots of references to cuisine, including a complete recipe for aşure (which I see no reason to attempt).

Did that all add up to enough to justify rapid-reading 360 pages of pseudo-philosophical potboiler? Nope. So my search for translated Turkish authors who are Not Pamuk will have to continue. (Speaking of which: How annoying is it that Şafak has seven titles in print in English and the only book I can find of Yessayan's is $50 on Amazon?)

[*] Again, it's typical of Şafak's inoffensive style that never identifies Ersoy by name, just as she keeps referring to Tuncay Özilhan only as "the Turkish Donald Trump" so provincials like me will feel Included.

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

I haven't (and surely won't) read the book. But if it's a translation, isn't it likely that some of the additions ("Donald Trump") and apparent omissions were made by the US editor to try to make it more accessible?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, the original was in English; the Turkish version is actually a translation. At least, that's how they're treated bibliographically. Neither the English nor the Turkish edition makes mention of a translator, so I can only assume Şafak did the work herself, which then prompts one to ask how much of the writing was originally done in Turkish rather than English. (The Turkish edition did appear earlier, but there are all sorts of reasons which could explain that.)

There are some problems of diction which make it clear we're dealing with a non-native author. For instance, when the first protagonist's mother (ostensibly a monolingual American woman from Kentucky) is bothered by her daughter's silences on the phone, she says, "Why don't you respond?" There are also a couple typos and other errors which a good editor should've caught. (In particular, repeated references to "the First World War" within a flashback supposedly taking place in 1915 are jarring, to say the least.)