Review: Elif Shafak’s The Bastard Of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, The Island Of Missing Trees & Honour
I came to Elif Shafak through a long and winding road. About a decade ago, I was invited to participate in a discussion in honour of the American Women’s History Month. In that conversation, I realised how limited my reading had been, shrunk within the confines of white, male, usually British or American authors and stories about men like themselves.
I hadn’t read that many Indian authors even. The Shobha Des and Khushwant Singhs that paraded Indianness in bookshops were not about people like me. There was an RK Narayan but he wrote about times before even my parents had been born. It would be a few years before I was able to navigate linguistic politics and look beyond the deficiences of translation to receive stories in other Indian languages.
But maybe because I was finally thinking about the idea, I found myself noticing that hitherto hidden majority of narratives – the tales of women of colour. I was really late to the avid reader, enthusiastic thinker, politically astute conversations but I raced to read the musts. Most of them were by black people. I only read in English and the American media is the most influential in this. So even within tokenism, they’d have the biggest share.
But what about the millions, billions even of brown women scattered across the world? I was getting closer to home and still not quite. I found commiseration in Kamila Shamsie from across the border and Meena Kandasamy from my generation & an awkwardly familiar part of the country.
Why Elif Shafak is special to me
And then there is Elif Shafak. When I first came across this name, I didn’t even realise it belonged to a woman. The title of the book ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’ intrigued me. I had visited Istanbul, my only trip to that part of the world. And I had been fascinated by the contrasts in the dressing of the women mirroring the European/Middle Eastern sections of the city. A word like ‘bastard’ is meant to catch your attention when you read it. And to my great surprise, it referred to a woman and the author was a woman too.
There are books that you read because you are required to. They aren’t necessarily boring but they sit in the shelves of your mind, categorised for quick reference, never far from reach because of the many conversations that they feature in. And then there are books like Elif Shafak’s are to me. I don’t love them all. I can barely quote from even the ones I adore. Yet, when I open one, I find myself traversing the worlds as if they are my own. I am not an observer with a scientific curiosity in the narrative; I am in the narrative.
This feeling is too intense for me to be able to discern if it’s Elif Shafak’s writing or the fact that her stories are relatable enough but also new enough to me. They span Turkey, Cypress, Britain, Armenia and many, many different types of women – from the hardbitten cynicism of urban heartbreak to the resilient hope of rural illiteracy to the dissociations of the war-displaced. The only one of her books that I had a viscerally negative reaction to focussed on male characters. I don’t think that is a coincidence.
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. And then there is Honour which tells me that women’s stories are never complete.
These are my reviews:
The Bastard of Istanbul – Elif Shafak
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.
The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
I’m currently at 57% of the book and I’ve decided to give it up. It’s not that it’s badly written. But the story is really belaboured. It’s as if the author is so much in awe of Shams that she’s forgotten the story has to come first.
This is the second Elif shafak/ ಮಮತಾ ಸಾಗರ book I’m reading after The Bastard of Istanbul. I enjoyed that one a lot even if the pacing slowed in between. Even the dull moments of that book had enough joy to keep me going. I see no joy in these pages, only heavy-duty moralising, some very boring history (possibly rewritten, I don’t know enough to comment except that it’s very boringly put).
This book lacks the levity that made the heavy themes of the previous one bearable and even good. No more for me, thank you.
The Island of Missing Trees – Elif Shafak
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. 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 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.
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. 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.
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.
This book definitely goes on my Comfort Reads list.
Honour – Elif Shafak
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.