Book Review: THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL by Elif Shafak

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Let's start with the basics. The facts. If we can make it through the facts we can then talk about other things."

There is something rather horrid in this controversial novel. I knew it before picking it up, based on the real life lawsuits filed against the author in her native Turkey (which made me all the more anxious to read it). I can confirm the book's need for trigger warnings upon finishing it.

But then, there is something horrible in human nature, as our capacity for genocide shows. The book touches on the Armenian Genocide after World War I, a truth so well suppressed, that it is something I only heard of after a dear friend shared her Elif Shafak books with our book club. It chilled me to my core, to see a map marked black where 100% of its Armenian population had been forcibly marched to the desert, and/or wiped out with outright murder, decades before Hitler and his death camps.

There is horror, yes, but also much to savor. Like poison hidden in the sweetest dessert, the final chapters of the book hit this reader with a force similar to an emotional sledge hammer, precisely because I had been lulled to complacency in the earlier chapters.

Shafak coats her politics and feminism with seeming airiness and a light prose touch, which makes the message hit all that much harder when she chooses to finally deliver it.

"Am I responsible for my father's crime?"
"You are responsible for recognizing your father's crime."

To be honest, this is partly the reason why it took me a few months to get through the book, but now I'm glad I finished it.

Read at one level, it is a twisted family drama: a teenager is pregnant, and no one knows who the father is. But then as national history merges with the personal, we see that the characters are meant to be metaphors for sectors of society, all in one melting pot of a city and country.

Shafak's love for Istanbul shines through. She starts and ends with the saying "Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shalt not curse it. That includes the rain." It reminded me of another author (Juan Villoro) who wrote about Mexico, but with a similar sentiment: "You belong to the place where you pick up the trash. It's easy to be proud of a city's palaces and glories: The true test of belonging is being willing to deal with its waste."

It's worth pondering, as a Filipino in 2022, over Shafak's example of patriotic love that includes being brave enough to look at a country's past, ALL of it. And then dealing with the aftermath as courageously as one can. "Without knowing your father's story, how can you expect to create your own story? ... Being a bastard is less about having no father than having no past," she reminds us. She risked imprisonment because this book was accused of "denigrating Turkishness," but was thankfully spared.

When a country's authorities crack down on the most basic freedoms of human expression, then all the more, that is when its people should carry on. Discussion can only bring about progress. Enforced homogenization based on fiction and lies brings about its withering.

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