The Gaze by Elif Shafak
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 12 August 2023
Penguin, 2018, 265 p. Translated from the Turkish, Mahrem, by Brendan Freely
Shafak has been called by no less an authority than Orhan Pamuk “the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade.” Her background is a little more than simply Turkish though, as she has lived in Turkey, the US and now London. Her later books have been written in English, though her afterword here says she has these latter works translated into Turkish by professional translators which she then rewrites with “my rhythm, my energy and my vocabulary.” Then, presumably, they are translated back into English otherwise why would Brendan Freely have been required? This is the first book of hers that I have read. I doubt it could have been written by someone whose only experience of culture is anglophile. There are various flights of fancy more akin to magic realism than straightforward representational fiction or excursions into faery.
Our (unnamed) female narrator lives with her lover – only ever named B-C – in the Hayalifener Apartments in Istanbul. Whenever they appear in public they attract attention because she is obese and he is a dwarf. Their story is interspersed with that of Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi whose birth killed his mother. He was born smelling of wax, with a transparent face and his waxy body had to be shaped by his aunt before he hardened into shape but time ran out before she could complete his eyes. In Pera in 1885 he sets up an entertainment complex in a huge cherry coloured tent. Here women can observe all the ugliness of the world including Sable Girl, descendant of the offspring of a sable and a human in Siberia in 1648, and who have bred true hybrids ever since. In a separate show men can contemplate all that is beautiful; such as La Belle Annabelle whose equally incredible origin story originates from Paris in 1868. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi “knew well that women were each other’s enemies above all,” and that “There were rules that all women knew but never mentioned.”
The narrator bites her cuticles raw, an unsavoury incident from her past gives a possible psychological explanation both for this and her compulsion to eat. It continues to haunt her. “When people commit sins, they can’t stand to be in the same place with someone who has witnessed this,” and “If there are no witnesses a person can forget the past.”
One of her observations is that when dieting, “with just one bite of chocolate, the will power that the person has with time and effort wrapped around the spool begins to unravel. And it’s too late to reel it back in. After you’ve eaten chocolate you can eat anything. Just as a sinner who has once committed the gravest sin considers other sins too insignificant to cause suffering, so any kind of food seems harmless after you’ve eaten a box of chocolates.” Another states “The stomach is a mythical land. Guards made of chocolate wait all along the borders. Once you’ve eaten the guards there’s nothing left to prevent you from breaking your diet.”
Lover B-C thinks that “our lives are based on seeing and being seen” and begins to compile a Dictionary of Gazes. This, especially the tenor of the extracts from it, reminded me a bit of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. B-C says its entries are secretly linked to each other “‘a shaman’s cloak of forty patches and a single thread.’” Its entry for hallucination reads: “For thousands of years people had been drinking infusions of mushrooms in order to see what they hadn’t seen. Later they became frightened of what they could see.”
The text builds up its effect with various repetitions and references back. When the narrator finally reads the Dictionary of Gazes she realises B-C’s true intentions. “What he wanted was to take bits and pieces of my stories and other people’s stories and mix them all together. When he’d done this there’d only be a single thread holding it all together; himself!” This is of course as true of Shafak as the writer of this book while also describing it pretty well.
In a final twist that resembles Kate Atkinson’s in A God in Ruins but isn’t quite as stark our narrator imagines how all that came before might have been altered. “Everything could have worked out differently. That means every story can be told differently.”
Shafak tells this one very well indeed.
Pedant’s corner:-“off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’,) “that wouldn’t fit into their sleds behind them was they went” (as they went,) “nourished not only by his mother’s blood but the also by time itself” (no need for that ‘the’,) canvasses (canvases,) “he greeted me with either with” has one ‘with’ too many,) “make up stories, and kneed coloured clay” (knead,) “had showed me” (shown me,) “and me and my warmly dripping fat had been flung for miles” (and I and my warmly dripping fat,) “Fames’ breath” (Fames’s,) “didn’t take its eyes of the East” (off the East,) “trying to loose weight” (lose; plus three more instances of ‘loose’ for ‘lose’,) “but when something large become smaller” (becomes,) “she emptied bowl of pigeon feed” (the bowl of pigeon feed,) chaise-longe (x 2, chaise-longue,) “a few grams less” (a few grams fewer,) “it makes it’s own way” (its own way,) “a Cyclops’ cave” (Cyclops’s,) Odysseus’ (Odysseus’s,) “before it has” (rest of sentence is in past tense; so ‘before it had’,) “because there were still something that had stayed inside me” (because there was still,) a missing space between a colon and what followed.) “At that moment the moment the fish began jumping” (no need for ‘the moment’,) “the Two Scillies” (the Two Sicilies that would be,) “and flung in at the cat” (flung it at the cat,) one new paragraph was unindented, “who has a issue with” (an issue,) “it was as he was looking” (as if he was looking,) “and I not only hadn’t I eaten anything” (No need for the second ‘I’,) “to sacrifice itself on the wet mother-of-pearl alter” (altar.) “I was getting light-ter” (I’ve no idea why this was hyphenated in such a way,) “does humanity has any privacy at all?” (have any privacy,) “had stepped on the breaks” (brakes.) “The crowd are holding their breath” (crowd here is singular, the crowd is holding.)