The Bastard of Istanbul

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL

Elif Shafak is the author of five previous novels and a collection of essays. In Turkey she has won the Mevlana Prize for Literature as well as the Turkish Novel Award. She has written for
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
,
Time
, and
The Wall Street Journal
, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. She lives in Istanbul.

Praise for
The Bastard of Istanbul
by Elif Shafak

“Shafak’s charming, smart, and profoundly involving spinning top of a novel dramatizes the inescapability of guilt and punishment, and the inextricable entwinement of Armenians and Turks, East and West, past and present, the personal and the political. By aligning the ‘compulsory amnesia’ surrounding the crimes in one family with Turkey’s refusal to confront past crimes against humanity, Shafak makes the case for truth, reconciliation and remembrance.”

—Donna Seaman,
Newsday

“In a better world, Turkish writer Elif Shafak would get more attention for her zesty, imaginative writing and less for the controversy her politics stir up. . . . A lively look at contemporary Istanbul and family through the eyes of two young women, one Turkish and one Armenian American.”

—Deirdre Donahue,
USA Today

“Beautifully imagined . . . it’s as much family history as national history that drives this vital and entertaining novel. And it’s the powerful and idiosyncratic characters who drive the family history. And, as you hear in your mind’s ear, it’s Shafak’s vibrant language that drives the characters.” —Alan Cheuse,
Chicago Tribune

“The purposeful ignorance of Shafak’s Turks, born out of a willing turning away from past familial horrors, becomes a symbol for the collective Turkish turning away from the horrors of the Armenian genocide. Shafak is incapable of bringing harmony to such unsettled matters, even in the pages of a fiction narrative. All she can do, and does, is shine a light on the past, and keep it shining so that everyone— Turkish, Armenian, and otherwise—must look.”

—Saul Austerlitz,
San Francisco Chronicle
(front page)

“There’s more going on than interfamilial melodrama, and Shafak’s ambitions do not stop with an airing of Turkey’s century-old dirty laundry. . . . In the end, Shafak resists a tidy wrap-up. She leaves most of her characters in the lurch, abandoning them midcrisis, their dilemmas only deepened with a dose of ambiguity. But how else could she leave them? The point here—and of the ugly fuss that has greeted the book’s publication—is that the past is never finished, never neat, and never ours.”

—Ben Ehrenreich,
Los Angeles Times

“Shafak’s writing is seductive; each chapter of her novel is named for a food, and the warmth of the Turkish kitchen lies at the center of its wide-ranging plot.
The Bastard of Istanbul
portrays family as more than merely a function of genetics and fate, folding together history and fiction, the personal and the political into a thing of beauty.” —Jennifer Gerson,
Elle

“A deftly spun tale of two families—one Armenian American and the other Turkish—who are burdened by dark secrets and historical tragedies rooted in a common Istanbul past.” —Amberin Zaman,
The Economist

“Rich and satisfying . . . a vital reminder of history’s hold on us, of how the past can still control the present . . . Shafak’s prose is rich with telling detail and witty description.” —Moira McDonald,
The Seattle Times

“A brave, ambitious book . . . Shafak has used the familiar form of the diaspora family saga as an asbestos glove with which to grasp the afterlife of the Armenian catastrophe. Her novel features the requisite cast of colorful female characters, elaborately described meals, fragments of folktales. . . . Shafak is careful to sketch in the different shades of Turkish defensiveness, as well as to consider what responsibility we bear for our fathers’ crimes, especially when the wound has outlived the perpetrators.” —Maria Margaronis,
The Nation

“Bold and raggedly beautiful ... although this book is crowded with characters, its most vivid one is not one of the Kazanci matriarchs but Istanbul itself. It is a city plagued by ghosts, talking and thronged to the extreme but notable for what it is silent about.” —John Freeman,
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)

“Through her characters Shafak examines how the stories we love and the stories we tell become who we are. Her writing is beautiful and meaningful and will astound you as you find the many ways to claim the story as, also, your own. . . . This is an important book about forgetting, about retelling stories, about denial, about not knowing your past, about knowing your past, and about choosing (again and again) to start over.” —Sherrie Flick,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A fast paced story of love, loss, and coincidence. Shafak writes powerfully of war (cultural and familial), of peace and the meaning of moral fortitude. She possesses a steady hand when it comes to creating strong female characters, and her vivid descriptions of the charms of Istanbul serve to lure the traveler.... Shafak’s characters linger in the mind days after finishing the book.”

—Patricia Corrigan,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Mixing humor and tragedy as effortlessly as her two unforgettable families blend and jumble up the many layers of their identity, Elif Shafak offers up an extravagant tale of Istanbul and Arizona, food and remorse, mysticism and tattoos, human comedy and yes, massacres. Quite an exceptional literary feast.” —Ariel Dorfman

PENGUIN BOOKS
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007
Published in Penguin Books 2008

Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2007 All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-0-143-11271-6

1. Armenians—Turkey—Fiction. 2. Armenians—California—San Francisco—Fiction.
3. Armenian Americans—Fiction. 4. Armenian massacres, 1915-1923—Fiction.
5. Istanbul (Turkey)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H328B37 2007
813’.6—dc22 2006042116

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

—The preamble to a Turkish tale ... and to an Armenian one

W
hatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it.

That includes the rain.

No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how icy the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the heavens might have in store for us. Everybody knows this. And that includes Zeliha.

Yet, there she was on this first Friday of July, walking on a sidewalk that flowed next to hopelessly clogged traffic; rushing to an appointment she was now late for, swearing like a trooper, hissing one profanity after another at the broken pavement stones, at her high heels, at the man stalking her, at each and every driver who honked frantically when it was an urban fact that clamor had no effect on unclogging traffic, at the whole Ottoman dynasty for once upon a time conquering the city of Constantinople, and then sticking by its mistake, and yes, at the rain . . . this damn summer rain.

Rain is an agony here. In other parts of the world, a downpour will in all likelihood come as a boon for nearly everyone and everything—good for the crops, good for the fauna and the flora, and with an extra splash of romanticism, good for lovers. Not so in Istanbul though. Rain, for us, isn’t necessarily about getting wet. It’s not about getting dirty even. If anything, it’s about getting angry. It’s mud and chaos and rage, as if we didn’t have enough of each already. And struggle. It’s always about struggle. Like kittens thrown into a bucketful of water, all ten million of us put up a futile fight against the drops. It can’t be said that we are completely alone in this scuffle, for the streets too are in on it, with their antediluvian names stenciled on tin placards, and the tombstones of so many saints scattered in all directions, the piles of garbage that wait on almost every corner, the hideously huge construction pits soon to be turned into glitzy, modern buildings, and the seagulls. . . . It angers us all when the sky opens and spits on our heads.

But then, as the final drops reach the ground and many more perch unsteadily on the now dustless leaves, at that unprotected moment, when you are not quite sure that it has finally ceased raining, and neither is the rain itself, in that very interstice, everything becomes serene. For one long minute, the sky seems to apologize for the mess she has left us in. And we, with driblets still in our hair, slush in our cuffs, and dreariness in our gaze, stare back at the sky, now a lighter shade of cerulean and clearer than ever. We look up and can’t help smiling back. We forgive her; we always do.

At the moment, however, it was still pouring and Zeliha had little, if any, forgiveness in her heart. She did not have an umbrella, for she had promised herself that if she was enough of an imbecile to throw a bunch of money to yet another street vendor for yet another umbrella, only to forget it here and there as soon as the sun came back, then she deserved to be soaked to the bone. Besides, it was too late now anyway. She was already sopping wet. That was the one thing about the rain that likened it to sorrow: You did your best to remain untouched, safe and dry, but if and when you failed, there came a point in which you started seeing the problem less in terms of drops than as an incessant gush, and thereby you decide you might as well get drenched.