The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak

   2007; 366 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Turkish Literature; Historical Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Say hello to Asya Kazanci.  She’s a Turk, lives in Istanbul, and is the daughter of Zeliha Kazanci, whom she calls “Auntie”.  She doesn’t know who her father is, nor does anyone else except Zeliha, who isn’t telling.

 

    Say hello to Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian.  She’s an Armenian-American who splits her time between Tucson, where her American mother, Rose, lives; and San Francisco, where her Armenian dad, Barsam, lives.  Rose and Barsam are divorced.

 

    The odds of Asya and Armanoush ever meeting are very slim, since neither one has ever visited, nor has any plans of visiting each other’s country.  And if somehow that happened, the odds of them — one a Turk, the other an Armenian — becoming friends are even slimmer.

 

    But since they’re the two main protagonists in The Bastard of Istanbul, I’m betting they'll somehow overcome those long odds.

 

What’s To Like...

    The book's title is explained early on and is brutally straightforward: if you’re a fatherless-child in Istanbul, you will be labeled a bastard.  Asya copes with this relatively well, but her family situation is still weird. The men in the Kazanci clan all die at an early age, mostly in their early 40s.  Thus Asya grows up among a group of "Aunties", including one who’s actually her mother.  Armanoush's family situation is also weird; she's surrounded by Aunties when she’s in San Francisco, and when she in Tucson, she's the typical rebellious teen, resenting both her mother and her stepfather, Mustafa, Rose’s second husband, and who’s a Turk, not an Armenian.

 

    With one exception, the eighteen chapters in the book all have a food, spice, or grain heading (Cinnamon, Garbanzo Beans, Wheat, Orange Peels, etc.), each of which somehow get worked into the chapter’s events.  The lone exception is the last chapter, which has a chemical title, Potassium Cyanide.  It would be a spoiler to reveal how that figures into the story.

 

    The story is set in two time periods: 2005 (the present) and 1915, and three places – Istanbul, San Francisco, and Tucson, with present-day Istanbul being the predominant one.  I chuckled at the climate description of Tucson (“the weather in Arizona is always nice, you know, nice and sunny”).  I live in Arizona, and can assure you that our “sunniness” is NOT nice when the daytime high temperatures are above 100°F, which is about the half the year.

 

    I thoroughly enjoyed getting a feel for daily life in Istanbul, including doing things such as: listening to Madonna and Johnny Cash on the radio, fishing from a bridge while holding an umbrella when it’s raining, taking ballet classes, smoking pot and wearing hippie skirts, going to tattoo parlors, and drinking milk from glass bottles or having a cherry-vanilla diet coke.  I also learned how to foresee my future via tarot cards and/or pouring lead, and protecting myself via evil-eye beads..

 

    The storyline held my interest, and Elif Shafak’s writing style delighted my vocabulary tastes in three different languages: Turkish, Armenian, and English, with a few examples given in the next section.  I learned about Milan Kundera and Mesrop Mashtots, the recipe for Ashure, and how funerals are different in Turkey compared to here.  I also liked the way Elif Shafak worked a “is it natural or supernatural?” aspect into the story, via a pair of djinni that are at Auntie Banu’s beck and call.

 

    The ending is good and features a twist or two to keep you on your toes.  Justice prevails, although it isn't meted out by heavenly agents.  The Bastard of Istanbul is a standalone novel without a sequel, although I for one would really like to know more about what comes next in life for Asya and Armanoush.  According to Wikipedia, the book was originally written in English, despite Elif Shafak being Turkish.  I’m in awe of anyone who can write a bestselling novel in their “second language”.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Simit (n., Turkish) : a crispy sesame-seed coated bagel.

Others: Konak (n., Turkish); Dipsomaniac (n.); Mordant (adj.); Concomitantly (adv.), Bolshie (adj., British); Odar (n., Turkish); Oluevi (n., Turkish).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 1,437 ratings and 359 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.86/5 based on 44,393 ratings and 4,853 reviews

 

 

Excerpts...

    “What are you listening to?” Armanoush asked loudly.

    “Huh?” Asya shouted, “Johnny Cash!”

    “Oh, sure!  What are you reading?”

    “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy,” the same loud, steady voice replied.

    “Isn’t that a bit irrational too?  How can you listen to music and concentrate on existential philosophy at the same time?”

    “They square perfectly,” Asya remarked.  “Johnny Cash and existential philosophy, they both probe the human soul to see what’s inside, and unhappy with their findings, they both leave it open!”  (loc.2858)

 

    “Look, the Armenians in the diaspora have no Turkish friends.  Their only acquaintance with the Turks is through the stories they heard from their grandparents or else from one another.  And those stories are so terribly heartbreaking.  But believe me, just like in every nation, in Turkey too there are good-hearted people and bad people.  It is as simple as that.  I have Turkish friends who are closer to me than my flesh-and-blood brother.  And then there is, of course” —he lifted his glass and signaled toward Auntie Zeliha — “this crazy love of mine.”  (loc. 3726)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Bastard of Istanbul sells for $9.99 at Amazon right now.   Elif Shafak offers nine other e-books in English, ranging in price from $9.45 to $13.99.  Eight of them are novels, the other one is a non-fiction book, titled Black Milk.

 

“The oppressor has no use for the past.  The oppressed has nothing but the past.”  (loc. 3810)

    I can't think of anything to gripe about in The Bastard of Istanbul, but I love reading both historical fiction in general and Turkish literature in particular.  But prospective readers should know that, although the cussing is light (just 12 swear words in the first 50% of the book!), a number of non-cozy themes are encountered, including rape, abortions, suicide, divorce, incest, and Armenian-Turkish relations.

 

    That last one may sound ticky-tacky, but it isn’t.  In the book’s “Acknowledgements” section, Elif Shafak writes:

 

    “Between the Turkish edition and the English edition of this novel in 2006, I was put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.  The charges that were brought against me were due to the words that some of the Armenian characters spoke in the novel: I could have been given up to a three-year prison sentence, but the charges were eventually dropped.”

 

    For the record, I thoroughly appreciated the amount of attention given to issue of Turkish-Armenian relations in The Bastard of Istanbul.  I was aware of its historical causes, but had no idea it was still such a divisive topic today.

 

    9 Stars.  I have one other novel by Elif Shafak on my Kindle, The Architect’s Apprentice.  I was worried that I’d find The Bastard of Istanbul too "romantic" for my reading tastes, but that turned out to not be the case.  I think I'll go look for more of her books at my local bookstores.

Last Train To Istanbul - Ayse Kulin

   2002 (in original Turkish), 2006 (English translation); 396 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Turkish Literature; Historical Fiction - Turkey; Historical Fiction – World War 2; Romance.  Laurels: European Council Jewish Community – Best Novel Award (winner, but I’m not sure what year).  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    It was a tragic case of forbidden love.  Kinda like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Rafael is Jewish, Selva is Muslim, and they’re in love, much to the consternation of their parents.  Family ties run strong in their native Turkey in the 1930s, so they decide to emigrate to Paris until things cool down, since the French are more tolerant about things like religious differences.

    But things change in 1941.  World War 2 is underway and the Germans have overrun northern France and occupied Paris.  The Nazis do care about religious differences, especially if you are Jewish.  So once again Selva and Rafael are forced to pack up and move south, to Marseilles, which the Germans have allowed the French puppet government, “Vichy France”, to control, at least for now.

    The respite is short-lived though, and in 1943 when the Nazis take over all of France, they don’t hesitate to seek out any and all Jews in France, regardless of citizenship, and ship them off in cattle cars to concentration camps.  Selva and Rafael have run out of places to flee to, as have all other Jews in France, both Turkish and otherwise.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Turkey, who is still neutral in the war, is willing to take some risks to help its expatriates in France.

    It’s just a question of exactly what can be done.

What’s To Like...

    Last Train To Istanbul is written by Ayse Kulin, a tremendously popular Turkish novelist who often combines history and romance in her books.  Here, she presents several relationships (Selva/Rafael, Sabiha/Macit, Ferit/Evelyn, and others) while examining religious bigotry against the backdrop of the holocaust, and the efforts by Turkish diplomats to rescue Turkish citizens, Jewish and otherwise, living in wartime France.

   I found the World War 2 political situation very enlightening.  Turkey was neutral throughout the storyline, and it was illuminating to see the conflict from her point-of-view.  The Allies wanted Turkey on their side, mostly so that Germany would then attack her, thus opening a new front.  Britain promised her arms, but never delivered.  Germany wanted Turkey’s chrome for its war machine, which at the time she was selling to the Allies.  Russia wanted an excuse to sweep down and take over the Bosporus Strait, gaining direct access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.  I got the impression that everyone wanted to “use” Turkey, but no one really wanted to be her friend and I wondered how much-or-little this “attitude” has changed since then.

    The history of Turkey and the Jews was also new to me.  When Ferdinand, the King of Spain, expelled all Jews from there in 1492, it was Turkey who welcomed any and all of them, recognizing that a large percentage of them were skilled and highly educated.  Therefore, despite being a Muslim country, Turkey has had a sizable Jewish element in its population for the past 500 years.

    It was also a treat to be immersed in the day-to-day life in Turkey during the 1930s/40s.  We get to play bezique and bridge, sip raki, and drink Tekel beer.   Our wives get to wear silk dresses when going to tea parties, where they’ll drink from elegant and distinctive Turkish tea glasses.  Our daughters take ballet lessons, and we all like to smoke cigarettes and partake of hot chocolate with sugar added to it. Bon appetit!

    The book is set in 1933-1943,  and in various cities in Turkey and France, with one brief side trip to Cairo.  You’ll learn a bit of French, Turkish, and Spanish, and John W. Baker seems to have done a decent job of translating the story into English.  Being a chemist myself, I liked that Rafael was also one, but it turns out that a “chemist” in Europe is what we Yanks would call a “pharmacist”.

    The story builds to the titular “Last Train to Istanbul”, which encounters a suitable number of tension-filled incidents that threaten the success of the mission.  The ending may be predictable, but it left a lump in my throat.  I found the “Acknowledgements” section at the end of the book to be quite informative, as Ayse Kulin details the sources she used to write this story.  Last Train To Istanbul is a standalone story, and AFAIK, there is no sequel.

Kewlest New Word ...

Kavass (n.) : an armed constable or courier in Turkey.

Excerpts...

    “How on earth do you speak all evening with someone you hardly know?” he asked Muhlis.

    “Come on now, what do you mean you hardly know her?  Haven’t we all been out together a few times?”

    “That was different, we weren’t alone.”

    “Tell her about your homeland.  Ask about her family.  Tell her how beautiful she is.  Don’t tread on her toes if you dance together and kiss her before dropping her off at home.”

    “What!”

    “Kiss her, my dear friend, kiss her.  Women like to be kissed.”

    “You mean on the lips?”

    “I suppose there’s no harm in being cautious; try kissing her on the cheek first, then you can take it from there.  I want to hear all about it when you get home.”

    “Never!”  (loc. 2428)

    “We’ll be providing them with passports.  But if something should happen en route, they’ll have to act as if they are Turkish.  They should at least be able to say a few words.  You teach Turkish.  Would you…?”

    “You want me to teach them Turkish, is that it?”

    “Would you?”

    “Happily.  As a matter of fact, I’ve been doing it in Marseilles for some time.  I can help them memorize a few sentences.  But I need to ask you a question – what do you mean, ‘act as if they are Turkish’?  I’m curious to know how one’s supposed to act Turkish.”  (loc. 3626)

Kindle Details…

    Last Train to Istanbul presently sells for $4.99 at Amazon.  Five other e-books by Ayse Kulin are available there, ranging in price from $0.99 to $10.99.  The Italian version of Last Train to Istanbul goes for $2.99; the German version goes for $4.99.

“There’s a saying in Turkish:  He who falls into the sea will cling even to a serpent.”  (loc. 4931 )

    There’s not much to quibble about in Last Train To Istanbul.  A number of secondary plot threads remained unresolved, mostly involving the various romantic relationships.  They could probably be worked up into a sequel, but I don’t think it’s necessary.  The book’s primary storyline – the extraction of a trainload of people suffering from the Nazi atrocities – was resolved quite effectively.

    There is a fair amount of cussing in the book, almost all of it in dialogues, but this is realistic in a wartime story.  There is one digression to Auschwitz, which didn’t seem to have much to do with the story, but Ayse Kulin explains in the Acknowledgements section why it was included, and I applaud her decision to do so.

    8½ Stars.  Overall I found Last Train To Istanbul to be both a fascinating and an informative book, and highly recommend it to anyone wanting to see World War 2 from a different viewpoint than the standard "us versus them" perspective.  One other Ayse Kulin book, Without A Country, resides on my Kindle and I'm eager to see if it's as good as this one.

Madonna In a Fur Coat - Sabahattin Ali

    1943; 201 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Turkish Literature; Romance.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Never has Raif Efendi had his life touched this profoundly!  Maybe it's her enigmatic smile.  Perhaps it's her eyes, filled with anguish and resolve.  It might even be the fur coat she’s wearing.  Or her plump lips, her slightly swollen eyelids, her long nose, or even her slightly upturned chin.  Probably it’s a combination of all these features.

    Alas, 'tis a pity that this is a painting, not an actual person.  It’s hanging in an art gallery at an exhibition.

    But do not despair, Raif.  There must be some information listed in the exhibition catalog.  And sure enough there is.

    The painting is titled “Maria Puder, Self-portrait”.   So now you have a name, and possibly even a picture of your dream woman.  That’s a start.

    Unfortunately, you’re in Berlin, and you’re a poor Turkish immigrant, here to learn the soap-making trade.  You can barely find your way to the soap factory, and this is post-World War One Germany.  The Yellow Pages haven't been invented yet.

    But where there’s a will, there’s a way, Raif.  So maybe if you just go walking around the city, you’ll run into her.  Your Madonna In A Fur Coat.

What’s To Like...

    Madonna In A Fur Coat is a Turkish novel written in the 1940’s, set in Turkey in the 1930’s, with the main character, Raif, reminiscing about the time he spent in Berlin in the 1920’s.  The story is written in the first-person POV: by our never-named narrator for the first quarter of the book, then by Raif writing in his notebook for the rest of the way.

    The book is a masterful character study of the two protagonists.  Our narrator sees Raif as a mouse of a man, manipulated by the rest of his family, and stoically cowed at work .  He reminded me of Gregor Mamsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman.  But everything changes when he meets Maria, our other protagonist, who’s just as fascinating.  She's a strong female lead, and that may be commonplace nowadays, but not back in the 1940’s.

    The writing is impressive, given that this is an English translation from the original Turkish.  I liked the literary nods Sabahattin Ali gives to other prominent writers , both Turkish and worldwide: Turgenev, Theodor Storm, Jakob Wasserman, Michel Zevaco, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Ahmet Mithat Efendi, and Vecihi Bey.  There were also a couple of kewl art references.  I was introduced to Andrea del Sarto’s painting, Madonna of the Harpies, and was awed by it.

    This is a short book, barely 200 pages.  Wikipedia calls it a novella, but I think it’s too long for that designation.  Paradoxically, this was an easy read, despite the depth of the storyline.  I liked the post-WW1 “feel” of the settings, both in Turkey and in Germany.  These are countries that were on the losing side of that conflict, and their national psyches were impacted by that.  

    There’s not a lot of action in the book, which will turn off some readers.  Overall, this is a very sad tale, similar to classics like Flowers For Algernon and Doctor Zhivago, and that will turn off others.  It is also a Romance novel, which normally would cause me to run away from it.  Yet I thoroughly enjoyed the book.  It is an emotional rollercoaster ride, with incredible highs and lows, and with Fate dealing our two lovers some cruel twists.  Such is life at times.

Excerpts...

    He was rather ordinary, with no distinguishing features – no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a normal day.  Indeed, there was no part of his life – public or private – that might give rise to curiosity.  He was, in the end, the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves, “What does he live for?  What does he find in life?  What logic compels him to keep breathing?  What philosophy drives him as he wanders the earth?”  But we ask in vain if we fail to look beyond the surface – if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone.  (loc. 39)

    All my life, I’d shied away from human company, never sharing my thoughts with a soul.  How pointless this seemed now, and how absurd!  I’d thought that it was life itself that had ground me down, that my sadness stemmed from spiritual malaise.  After spending two hours with a book, and finding it more pleasurable than two years of real life, I’d remember again that life had no meaning and sink back into despair.

    But since first setting eyes on that painting, everything had changed.  (loc. 1271)

Kewlest New Word…

Pension n.; European) : a type of guest house or boarding house.

Others : Contretemps (n.).

Kindle Details...

    Madonna in a Fur Coat sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  Amazon doesn’t offer any other books by Sabahattin Ali in English, not even in paperback.  But if you’re fluent in Spanish or German, then there are several more options at Amazon.

“Even when he has a lamb between his teeth, a wolf can hide his savagery behind a smile.”  (loc. 1203)

    A few words should be said about Sabahattin Ali.  He was born in 1907, and died in 1948.  He was arrested in 1933 for writing a poem that was viewed as criticizing the policies of Turkey’s leader at the time, Kemal Ataturk, who's their equivalent of our George Washington.  He was jailed for several months, released, pardoned via amnesty, but required to write a nationalistic poem to prove his allegiance to Ataturk.

    He served in the Turkish military during World War 2, and was imprisoned and released once more in 1944.  He was subsequently denied a passport, and was murdered along the  Bulgarian border in 1948,  either by the smuggler he trusted, or the Turkish National Security Service.

    You might think this is just a product of Cold War mentality, but in 2005, the Turkish author (and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006) Orhan Pamuk was also persecuted by the Turkish government for expressing pro-Kurdish sentiments.  The specific charge was “insulting Turkisnness”.

    Apparently the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” is feared in Turkey.

   You can read the English-language Wikipedia article about Sabahattin Ali here.  There is a more complete Wkipedia article on him in Turkish, but unfortunately my knowledge of that language is limited to about two words.

    8½ Stars.  We’ll count this as my once-a-year highbrow read, even though it is probably more middlebrow (i.e.: “book club”) material.  It is also the fifth Turkish book I’ve read over the years, albeit only the second one since starting this blog.  The others are: Death In Troy, by Bilge Karasu; The Long White Cloud – Gallipoli, by Buket Uzuner; and two books by Orhan Pamuk, Snow and My Name Is Red.

Snow - Orhan Pamuk

2004; 463 pages. Translated by Maureen Freely. Genre : Contemporary Literature. Awards : One of the NY Times "10 Best Books of 2004"; Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first Nobel Prize in any category ever awarded to a Turkish citizen. Overall Rating : A-.

    .An exiled poet named Ka returns from Frankfurt to Kars, a small, impoverished city close to Armenia in eastern Turkey. His official reason is to do investigative reports on the upcoming local elections and the wave of suicides by teenage girls reportedly protesting the head scarf ban. But he also wants to look up an old flame, Ipek, now recently divorced from an Islamist. Things get complicated when a touring actor, along with a hometown Colonel, stage a local coup and begin arresting anyone who isn't a loyal nationalist.

.What's To Like..
    .The character development is excellent. Our hero Ka, for instance, is a mixture of dark and light. He is artistic and idealistic, yet naive and not very loyal. He can manipulate disparate factions into signing a proclamation protesting the coup, yet is equally manipulated by the Islamists, the coup leaders, and the secret police. He's handsome and charming enough to convince Ipek to move to Germany with him, yet his idea of "love" is for him to enable Ipek to go shopping for western clothes in Frankfurt, at the cost of her being hopelessly dependent on him because she's so far removed from her family in Turkey.
.
The story subordinates to Pamuk's look at the deep and varied issues and forces that pull at modern Turkey. The forces include militant Islamists, Kurdish separatists, secularists ("atheists" if you aren''t one), the Army, the Secret Police (which isn't the same as the military), the Attaturk nationalists, and the family unit. The issues include the wearing of the head scarf, suicide as an unpardonable sin in Islam, finding God, "east versus west", the hopeless plight of the Turkish poor, the widespread wiretapping and bugging of Turkish citizens, and something we in the USA can't relate to - how to live with recurring military coups.

.Amazingly, Pamuk treats all these forces and issues impartially. None are "all white"; none are "all black". If anything, he succeeds in painting them all the same shade of gray. You won't find any answers here, but you will gain deep insight into the complexity that is Turkey.

.We're Not Stupid; We're Just Poor.I have present- and past-life ties to Turkey, so I found Snow to be fascinating. It reminded me of Toni Morrison's Beloved though. If you can relate, it's great. If Turkey and head scarves and Kurds and modern-day Islam don't hold much interest to you, then this may be a slow and tedious read.

.An excerpt...
"People might feel sorry for a man who's fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all of its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It's all a joke : their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest-paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants' culture and sometimes even pretend they think of them as equals." (pages 298-99)