Review: The Island Of Missing Trees & Other Elif Shafak Books – Brown Girls Who Speak English
What a gentle, loving book this was! It felt like the peaceful calm after the tumult of more frenzied books. Not that it lacks for drama. If you know trees, you know there are worlds running along faster than a pair of eyes can keep up. There is tragedy, romance, adolescent angst, friendship, grief, affection, family, ambition and passion. It is set in the aftermath of (and some during) a political war. But every chapter, every description is gentle. Occasionally sorrowful, sometimes moody or yearning but never hard, cynical or violent. The Island Of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is the oasis after many storms.
With all of that, the book still managed to keep me engrossed. Perhaps that’s why it stood out in a sea of books being penned to be turned into movies, with the requisite cliffhangers, nail-biting twists, overwrought emotional scenes – anything that will look & sound dramatic on screen. This book is a good old-fashioned book, the way books once used to be, for readers wanting to contemplate feelings, savour sentences and treat the story like something growing along with their own selves.
I enjoy authors who neither glamorise childhood into an unrealistic haven nor throw young characters into tragedy porn the way popular Young Adult fiction does (Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread is another that holds up well on this count). Elif Shafak skillfully navigates the dingy corridors of girlhood, especially with its person-of-colour diaspora dangers. Being Indian, I found a lot of resonance in the Cyriot-British struggle while carrying scars of colonial and imperialist violence. That parenthood is not deified is an added bonus as this is often a facet of Asian and possibly Middle Eastern cultures. Even the dead parent is depicted with flaws, the reactions of the surviving relatives complex. And all of this done without descending into the maudlin – a tough bid considering the timeline/geography switching between the Cypress past and the Britain present. The fig tree as a character was a delightful conceit. I love trees and plants so I enjoyed the personification of all aspects of flora and fauna. But I’m not sure if that will appeal to people who aren’t as big on nature.
This book definitely goes on my Comfort Reads list. Elif Shafak’s work shows such an evolution from the young feminist angst of The Bastard Of Istanbul and the highbrow pretentiousness of The 40 Rules Of Love. The Island of Missing Trees is like a finely distilled essence of wisdom and hardwon peace after the storms. Just like a tree.
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif ShafakMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I LOVED this book. The writing got a bit clever in places but something still carried me along and now I know what it is.
This is a book about women, written by a woman. Men appear but as very minor plot points and are mostly depicted as narrow, fumbling creatures barely able to get from one moment to the next without messing up everything. That’s the way a lot of popular narratives go, except with the genders reversed – with men driving the stories and women functioning as convenient/inconvenient, pretty or not props and plot points. I deeply enjoyed reading a story that flips this on its head and treats life and men the way a lot of women probably feel only inside their own heads.
I also enjoyed the multiethnic flavour of Istanbul and its complicated history of Turks & Armenians. Cultures of colour intertwine mysticism into the everyday rituals of life. In stories by white people, these are usually treated as distinctly different things. But in this book, non-scientific ideas like a curse that takes away all male members of the family, are treated with the same everyday reactions as one has towards food, weather and other people – mild irritation, vague fears and slight interest in the moments between the more important job of living, loving and dying. Being Indian, I find this entirely relatable even if my culture has different mystic rituals and beliefs.
All in all, this was a refreshing read. I can’t wait to get to the next book, The Forty Rules of Love.
Honour by Elif Shafak by Elif ShafakMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book replaces The Bastard of Istanbul as my favourite book by Elif Shafak. Once again this story is about Turkish women navigating the changing faces of patriarchy between Western notions and their traditional values. But this time, we also see the journeys of the men through these same paths. The Turkish characters originate from poor remote villages rather than the bustling city of Istanbul.
A character calls her sun, ‘her sultan’. This reminds me too painfully of Indian motherhood’s ‘raja beta’ and my country of Oedipal syndromes, daddy issues and honour killings. Indian culture’s idea of honour ties into the policing of women’s bodies just as closely. And just as Shafak’s writing depicts, these notions are passed on through the generations even if they get less obvious with economic power and global (Western) exposure. They seem like mere scars on the surface but really they’re veins, throbbing with the very pulse of our lives. And any minute, our selves could be shattered by a single act, bringing down with them the worlds of our families, and communities to create a statement in racial politics. Brown people are never far away from these realities, no matter how many visas we accumulate.
It’s extra poignant to read this in the wake of the Hamas attacks and as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians surges on unfettered by the world’s gaze. Islamophobia is never mentioned or described graphically in this novel. It’s buried behind the huge walls of racism in Britain of the 1970s and even the 1990s. Nearly all the characters that choose to interact with the central family are peoples of colour and usually impoverished immigrants from brown countries (except one kindly black hairdresser). The Muslims are Lebanese, Egyptian, Pakistani and more. One notable character hails from Montreal and describes himself as being from everywhere but has Middle Eastern ancestry. A neat little suggestion by Shafak of the privilege of even being white-passing.
The writing might feel strange to readers used to the more linear narratives of white/Western authors. HONOUR moves fluidly between characters inner journeys, across countries and back and forth through time. Yet, it never feels cluttered because each location, character and point in time are so markedly described. It never gets hard to keep people’s lives or even the points in their lives straight because they are each written with such compassion. From a rural Turkish herbalist to an immigrant labourer in Abu Dhabi to an East European exotic dancer to a Lebanese cook. Every person’s journey counts as much as it would inside their own heads.
I applaud even the gentle feminism of this story that has grown much more nuanced from Shafak’s earlier works. This book covers much deeper issues of violence, racism, political genocide and economic exploitation. But in reading, you find yourself moved by even the characters who commit the worst acts of all. And miraculously this is done without graphic descriptions of violence or other such triggering things. You know they’re all happening but the author takes us on a deep dive of what these do to the people who live through these experiences.
This is a deep, nuanced reading. Enter only when you have the appetite to do it justice.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif ShafakMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What a gentle, loving book this was! It felt like the peaceful calm after the tumult of more frenzied books. Not that it lacks for drama – there is tragedy, romance, adolescent angst, friendship, grief, affection, family, ambition and passion. It is set in the aftermath (and some during) of a political war. But every chapter, every description is gentle. Occasionally sorrowful, sometimes moody or yearning but never hard, cynical or violent.
With all of that, the book still managed to keep me engrossed. Perhaps that’s why it stood out in a sea of books being penned so they can be turned into movies, with the requisite cliffhangers, nail-biting twists, overwrought emotional scenes – anything that will look & sound dramatic on screen. This book is a good old-fashioned book, the way books once used to be, for readers wanting to contemplate feelings, savour sentences and treat the story like something growing along with their own selves.
The fig tree as a character was a delightful conceit. I love trees and plants so I enjoyed the personification of all aspects of flora and fauna. But I’m not sure if that will appeal to people who aren’t as big on nature.
This book definitely goes on my Comfort Reads list.
