If you’re an NPR fan (which I’m betting you are, otherwise why are you reading this blog?), you may have already heard about Turkish author Elif Shafak and the firestorm surrounding her novel The Bastard of Istanbul. Like Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk and scores of other prominent Turkish authors, Shafak was charged under the now-infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that it is a crime to insult “Turkishness.” While recovering from childbirth in a hospital, she was acquitted in absentia. Not long after, her friend and colleague, the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was murdered by an ultranationalist.
What I wasn’t really aware of until doing a little research for this review is that these two incidents galvanized the Turkish public against Article 301, and against the government’s continuing denial that a genocide took place against the Armenian minority in 1915. The trial against Shafak was widely regarded as a farce. In the days after Hrant Dink’s death, crowds marched in the streets chanting “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenian.” The Turkish public is largely fed up, and is heavily in favor of changing laws to facilitate the country’s entry to the European Union and heal the wounds of the past.Shafak’s trial and subsequent backlash may be the catalyst that makes it happen. The Bastard of Istanbul has officially gone from “novel” to “cultural touchstone.” So, why write another review? What is left to say about it?
Shafak was the first author ever charged under Article 301 for statements made by characters in a novel. It’s a useful reminder to us here in the US that fiction, when handled properly, can be as incendiary as a pipe bomb. That it’s a method of speaking the truth that can have literal, actual world-changing consequences. That a novel can be a matter of life and death. One thing you won’t hear a lot about in the many articles that have been written about Shafak is the content of the actual book (aside from a few brief quotes of the passages that got her in hot water.) It seems like plain old bad manners to ask this: Is The Bastard of Istanbul — as a novel, a story, a reading experience rather than a political statement — any good?
The story is sprawling, populated by a cast of dozens, spanning a hundred years. It’s tough to summarize, but I’ll try. The story opens with Zeliha Kazanci, a rebellious, hot-tempered young woman in a miniskirt, angrily tromping through the rainy streets of Istanbul and cursing the skies. Before long, we find out why she is so disconsolate: she is pregnant, unmarried, and on her way to have an abortion. At the last minute, though, she can’t bring herself to go through with the procedure. And thus she becomes the mother of Asya, the titular bastard.
Fast forward to the present day. Asya is now the age that her mother was when she was born. Asya is suffocating in an all-female household, stuffed with Aunties and grannies. There’s her mother (who she calls Auntie Zeliha: a still unmarried Bohemian tattoo artist), Auntie Banu (a headscarf-wearing fortune teller) Auntie Feride (a paranoid schizophrenic with ever-changing hair color) and Auntie Cevriye (a shy schoolteacher). There’s Grandma Gulsum, a grim woman who has never fully accepted her granddaughter, and Petite-Ma, the senile great-grandmother who keeps the secrets hidden. All the Kazanci men have either died of illness, been killed by violence, or sent into exile. In the latter category is Uncle Mustafa, who moved to Arizona twenty years earlier and has never been back.