Penguin, 2013, 349 p.

When you start to read a book written by someone raised in a Muslim country and its title is Honour, you will most likely have a certain expectation of what will be in store. That expectation isn’t disappointed here. But this novel is written by Elif Shafak. Things are a bit more nuanced.

The novel does not have a linear structure. It starts in 1992, well after the main event it is concerned with exploring, before flipping back to a village near the River Euphrates in 1945, where the twin Kurdish girls Pink Destiny (Pembe) and Enough Beauty (Jamila) are born to a family already overburdened with daughters but still striving for a son. Its succeeding chapters stray unchronologically over the times in between those dates. Most of the scenes are rendered in third person past tense but there is a first-person account by Esma, Pembe’s daughter, and a journal written by her brother – “He a murderer” as Esma tells us in Chapter One, so not a spoiler – Iskender/Askander (the Kurdish and Turkish renderings of the name equivalent to Alexander) as he serves time in Shrewsbury Prison for that murder.

The plot gets in train when a man called Adem visits relatives in the Euphrates village and falls for Jamila. Unfortunately, she had been kidnapped in a dispute some while before and held hostage so her purity is in doubt. In such a place, “Men – even schoolboys – had honour. Women did not have honour. Instead they had shame.” Whether that is warranted or not.

Knowing his family would therefore not agree to a union with Jamila, Adem agrees to marry Pembe instead, eventually taking her to London while Jamila stays and becomes a sought-after midwife. Unsurprisingly Adem’s and Pembe’s marriage is not overly happy. When he leaves home to take up with an exotic dancer their eldest son Iskender takes on himself the mantle of protector of the family’s honour. However, Esma and younger brother Yunus are more liberal in their outlook. Pembe meanwhile muses on the way in which British people say of something minor, “It’s a shame.” To her, shame is a burning thing; not to be thought of as anything trivial.

Like Adem’s brother, Tafiq, Iskender is heavily under the influence of his traditional past. A Muslim known as the Orator tells a gathering Iskender has arranged that, “The two major industries in the West are the machine of war and the machine of beauty. With the machine of war they attack, imprison, torture and kill. But the machine of beauty is no less evil. All those glittery dresses, fashion magazines, androgynous men and butch women. Everything is blurred. The machine of beauty is controlling your minds.” Maybe so, but it illustrates the Orator’s blind spot. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the machine of religion also does that – usually far more effectively.

Tafiq reflects that, “Their honour was all some men had in this world.” For the rich it didn’t matter as they could buy influence. But; “the less means a man had, the higher was the worth of his honour.” His hint to Iskender that Pembe might be seeing another man (innocently enough, but Tafiq and Iskender don’t know that) sets the central tragedy in motion.

Honour is inflected with magic realism, but with a light touch. The twist towards the end which alters the perspective is signalled in the book’s first sentence and inherent in the plot, which is elegantly constructed with incidents and relationships which are seemingly peripheral turning out to be carefully inserted.

Shafak displays empathy with her characters, not condemnation. Despite the act of violence around which it revolves Honour is an intricate and ultimately humane read.

Pedant’s corner:- “The undeveloped baby had remained joined to her twin” (the undeveloped baby was previously described as a boy; so ‘had remained joined to his twin’.)

Penguin Essentials, 2019, 365 p. First published 2007.

Addressing as it does the Armenian genocide of 1916 (though only in a historical sense,) this was the book that saw the author put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness,” but the charges were eventually dropped.

The novel’s main focus is on the Kazancı family, one with an unfortunate history of its male members dying at a young age. There is a hint of magical realism here, the more sweeping kind of narrative more or less alien to the Anglophone tradition, in any case a nod to the supernatural elements which often appear in fiction from other literary backgrounds. The Kazancıs have a cat named Sultan. (They’re now on Sultan the Fifth. This naming system though, did remind me of Mad Jack’s burro in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.)

The chapter titles all relate to foodstuffs – or at least substances which can be ingested; cinnamon, pine nuts, orange peels, etc, though one is water and the last potassium cyanide. For the Kazancıs are a family for which food occupies a central nurturing role. Many Turkish dishes are named or described during the course of the novel.

In the first chapter the then nineteen-year-old Zeliha Kazancı strides the streets of Istanbul wearing her trademark short skirt – which she will not relinquish even in later years. Under harassment she recites to herself “The Golden Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite woman: When harassed on the street never respond” as that only fires up the enthusiasm of the harasser. (There are also Silver and Copper Rules of Prudence.)

Zeliha is on her way to a clinic to seek an abortion but, perhaps due to hallucinations brought on by anæsthetic or else a subliminal wish to carry the child – though the latter seems unlikely – becomes over-agitated and makes it impossible for the procedure to continue. The bastard of the title (though there is one other metaphorical candidate) could thus be Zeliha’s daughter, Asya, who is brought up among her aunts Banu, Feride and Cevriye, their mother, Grandmother Gülsüm, and the matriarch Petite-Ma. Acknowledging the unusual circumstances of Asya’s origins (in her late teens of the novel’s main timeline her father’s identity has still not been disclosed,) Zeliha is also known as aunty. The only son of the family, Mustafa, long ago left Istanbul for the US and has never returned. The aunts’ father had of course when still young succumbed to the curse on the family males. Even so, by the age of sixteen Asya had discovered that “other families weren’t like hers and some families could be normal,” a twist to that quote from Tolstoy. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7142-all-happy-families-are-alike-each-unhappy-family-is-unhappy]

Asya is fixated on Johnny Cash and spends time in Café Kundera, associating with characters identified only by their attributes, the Non-Nationalist Scenarist of Ultranational Movies, the Closeted-Gay Communist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet and the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, who says the real civilization gap is not between East and West but between Turks and the Turks. “‘We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city.’” The Exceptionally Untalented Poet says, “‘We are stuck between East and West …. the past and the future … the secular modernists … and the conventional traditionalists.’” In its own way this is a signal that the book could be read as a ‘condition of Turkey’ novel.* When one of them brings along a new girlfriend we are told of Asya that “When she met a new female she could do one of two things: either wait to see when she would start hating her or take the shortcut and hate her right away.”

Mustafa, in the US, has taken up with Rose, who was divorced from Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, a first generation Armenian American. Barsam and Rose’s daughter Armanoush (Amy,) is the second pivot of the plot, brought up as she was with her father’s family’s constant reinforcement of Armenian memories and attitudes vis-à-vis the Turks. Shafak has some fun depicting Amy’s date with a man she soon finds unsuitable, where they both contemplate plates of food whose arrangements are based on expressionist paintings. To resolve the conflict she feels between her US and Armenian heritages Amy decides to travel to Istanbul to visit her stepfather’s family, where her revelations about the treatment of her ancestors creates at first bewilderment.

“She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames.” For Armenians “time was a cycle, the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.” Even Aunt Cerviye, as a history teacher, was unaware of the details or extent of the Armenians’ tribulations. For the aunts, the history of Turkey only began in 1923, with Atatürk’s reforms. (Such historical forgettings, or forgettings of history, are by no means confined to Turkey, though.)

In another expression of literary apartness, that rebuff to Western fiction’s conventional realism, Aunty Banu has – or claims to have – control of two invisible djinn, one on each shoulder; the good one, whom she calls Mrs Sweet, on the right, the bad one, Mr Bitter, on the left. It is from Mr Bitter she learns the truth about the Armenians’ sufferings. And about Asya’s father, news which she keeps to herself, though his identity is revealed later.

Shafak has her characters make more general observations too. Asya tells Amy, “When women survive an awful marriage or love affair … they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however … the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

Curiously, Shafak at least twice used the word wee in the Scottish sense of small, as in “a wee bit.”

Some reviews I have seen online of The Bastard of Istanbul have been a bit sniffy, one even going so far as to say that on this evidence Shafak isn’t a good novelist. I suspect this means that reader had not had a wide experience of fiction from outwith the Anglosphere. Shafak’s writing has a brio, an exuberance, too often missing from that more staid inheritance.

Pedant’s corner:- *Turkey is now officially known as Türkiye; “wrack your nerves” (rack your nerves,) “and her cheeks sunk in” (sank in. There were other examples of ‘sunk’ for ‘sank’,) “as she laid still on a table” (as she lay still,) “phyllo pastry” (filo pastry,) “always on demand” (always in demand,) no introductory quotation mark when one chapter began with a piece of dialogue but there was with other chapters.

Penguin, 2015, 446 p. Translated from the Turkish Bit Palas (Meris Yayinlari, 2002) by Müge Göçek.

This, Shafak’s debut novel, has similarities with Aala Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building – both are concerned with the inhabitants of a block of flats – but was originally published in the same year so these will be coincidental.

From the outset it is clear that things will not be entirely straightforward: the narrator – accused of having a fanciful mind; ie talking nonsense – riffs on the differences between truth (conceived of as a horizontal line,) deception (a vertical one,) and nonsense (a circle.) This is as a way to approaching story, a circle can be entered anywhere; but it isn’t a beginning, nor is it an end.

We are then given the history of the building, Bonbon Palace, from ‘Before’ and even ‘Before Before,’ it was built on the site of an old Christian (Armenian) cemetery.

The inhabitants of the various flats within the building are Musa, Meryem and Muhammet; Sidar and Gaba; hairdresser Cemal and Celal, twins who were not actually brought up together; The Firenaturedsons family; Hadji adji Hadji, his Son, Daughter and Grandchildren; Metin Chetinceviz and HisWifeNadia; Me; The Blue Mistress; Hygiene Tijen and Su; Madam Auntie.

Already that running together of words in Firenaturedsons and HisWifeNadia signal the otherness of the narration, that heightened sense which comes from a slightly surreal take on fiction and can be a signature of non-Anglophone literature. The whole thing would seem to be narrated by the ‘Me’ occupying Flat 7 as his are the only sections written in the first person. Chapters of the book focus on and return to the flat-dwellers’ various lives in no particular order. The circumstances under which he wrote this account are not revealed  until the end.

Another surreal touch is that Bonbon Palace has an accumulation of rubbish around it which keeps being added to despite the attentions of bug fumigator Injustice Pureturk. This forms the core of the plot as, in an attempt to prevent people adding to the rubbish piles, ‘Me’ paints on the enclosing wall a sentence declaring a saint is buried inside the premises.

All serious novels are attempts to sum up the world in microcosm. Limiting the story to such a small part of the world highlights this. Not all of human life is here but a good portion of it certainly is.

An initial surprise to me was the use in the translation of the word wee in the Scottish sense (‘a wee bit of clarification,’ ‘one wee bit,’ ‘a wee bit of sadness’) – and the fine British term nutter (‘a good-for-nothing nutter’.)

Peppered throughout are some adages such as, “Men committing adultery find quality significant: they enjoy receiving from another woman love that is in essence different from what they receive from their wives. Yet women committing adultery find quantity significant: they enjoy receiving from another man love that is more than that which they receive from their husbands.”

The narrator’s assertion that “Life is absurd, at its core lies nonsense” is as good a justification for the deployment of magic realism – or exaggerated reality – in a novel as you could get.

Then again he says, “Deception turns truth inside out. As for nonsense, it solders deception and truth to each other so much so as to make them indistinguishable.”

So does fiction.

The Flea Palace is as accomplished a debut novel as anyone could wish to write – or read.

Pedant’s corner:- the print looks  as if was photocopied and on some pages is slanted, quantative (quantitative,) “raise to the ground” (raze to the ground,) sprung (several times, sprang,) “café chantants” (cafés chantants,) “she had suddenly ran screaming” (she had suddenly run screaming,) sunk (sank,) “the gage of their nature” (gauge. ‘Gage’ for ‘gauge’ appeared once more,) a missing full stop, “you might may well start to believe” (has a ‘might’ or a ‘may’ too many?) “where he had laid down” (lain down,) “in spite of our eating in hoards” (in hordes,) “as they silently drunk” (drank,) “of the ‘The Oleander of Passion’” (that first ‘the’ is not needed,) “had all ended up in flop” (ended up as flops,) “a unfussy end” (an unfussy end,) “raised to the ground” (razed to the ground,) shrunk (x 2, shrank,) tealeaf (tea leaf,) dopey (dopy,) “he would lay in the corner” (he would lie in ….,) “as if hadn’t been him” (as if it hadn’t been him,) “they always go through their houses as if they had never gone through it before” (‘houses’ therefore ‘them’ not ‘it’,) “chaise long” (chaise longue,) “and before you it, know” (before you know it,) gamma-amino-butiric-acid (it’s not spelled butiric, it’s gamma-amino-butyric acid,) “no sooner had they given their consent that an objection was voiced” (than an objection,) “the saints existence” (the saint’s existence,) “he fished from the thrash” (from the trash,) “the end of last the century” (end of the last century,) “I laid next to her” (I lay next to her.) “All though this period” (All through.)

Penguin, 2010, 366 p, including 2 p Glossary.

Here we have two novels in one. Or actually, it is more like a short story (actually perhaps a short novella) containing a novel within it. That novel has each chapter begin with a word which starts with the letter B as does The Forty Rules of Love as a whole.

The framing device is set in 2008 where Ella Rubinstein is a Jewish housewife in Pennsylvania, married to a philandering husband and, with her children more or less grown, beginning to wonder if she is wasting her life, but not really considering the nature of the experience of love. She has just secured a job reading manuscripts submitted to a publisher, the first of which is a novel titled Sweet Blasphemy written by an Aziz Z Zahara. When the oldest of her three children, Jeanette, suddenly announces she and her boyfriend Scott want to get married it precipitates a crisis in Ella’s life. The meat of The Forty Rules of Love, though, is in that submitted manuscript, which is the tale of the effect exerted on the life of the thirteenth century preacher Rumi by the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz. So taken by Sweet Blasphemy is Ella that she emails its author (without letting him know she is reading it for the publisher.) Through the ensuing correspondence she and Aziz fall for each other.

Sweet Blasphemy is told with a variety of viewpoint characters, each of whose voices Shafak renders superbly: the Killer, Shams, Rumi, The Novice, the Master, the Zealot, Suleiman the Drunk, Desert Rose the Harlot, Hasan the Beggar, Aladdin (not the pantomime character,) Kerra – Rumi’s Christian wife, who sees little difference between Christians and Muslims as people – Kimya (who falls in love with Shams,) Baybars the Warrior, Sultan Walad and Husam the Student, all adding up to a convincing picture of life in thirteenth century Anatolia.

In his encounters with others Shams shows himself fond of illuminating his philosophy with either a parable or else one of his Forty Rules of Love. (Whether there are forty of Shams’s rules given to us in the book I didn’t bother to count.)

His preference for the loving aspects of religious teaching does not enamour him to adherents of a more fundamental bent.

For Shams, “It’s easy to love a perfect God. ….. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” Moreover, “Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.” He is also wise. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together.”

Of religious zealots he says, “Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes it is no wonder they see a plethora of things to be afraid of,” they pick and choose only those verses of their holy book which conform to their inclinations and so ignore its totality.

In a passage that speaks to the similarities between fundamental Muslims and Calvinists he says, “By and large, the narrow minded say that dancing is sacrilege.” But when you think about it that attitude could be taken to be blasphemy. “They think God gave us music … then forbade us to listen to it.”

It is possible this thought may allude to the background of ‘Aziz Z Zahara’. It turns out he was born as one Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie! His own story is not without misfortune, though.

Love, along with sex and death, is of course one the three main preoccupations of the novel as a form. With Shams, Shafak’s focus on it here is more on the religious ideal but it is counterpoised with Ella’s relationship with ‘Aziz’. But Shams himself is incapable of extending his general love for humans with the more intense feelings a married man ought to have for his wife. Kimya reflects on her love for him that “Little did I know that I was making the most common mistake women have made throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.”

In his own way too, Shams is a fundamentalist.

Is there slight imbalance here, though? Would the novel succeed as well without the framing device? Possibly.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful, complex and compassionate book. As an author Shafak is certainly the real deal.

Pedant’s corner:- “on my doorsill” (usually it’s a doorstep,) strived (strove,) caravanseries (caravanserais,) “portabella mushrooms” (Portobello mushrooms,) bookstore (in an email from “Aziz”. As a Scot, he would surely say ‘bookshop’,) “like a broken faucet” (ditto; ‘like a broken tap’, but then, the book is written in USian,) “off of” (I know it’s USian but it annoys me. Just ‘off’, please,) “no other” (none other.)

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.)