As I mentioned in my original review of this Shafak novel, I was going through, rather unconsciously, a mild depression while reading it. It was my first year in university away from home, and I had just returned to the capital city for my second semester after a three-months long summer vacation. Upon returning to the beautiful capital city, I was utterly homesick and terribly at odds with everything with my life. I hated that our previous hostel was closed down, and now we were living in an eight-bedroom, awfully sustained, unhygienic, and cheap house turned into a hostel for students on a tight budget. Yet I had to live there, because the only friend I had managed to make was living there, with his own friends of course. Besides, the campus life was giving me sinking stomachs as well: the majority of the students weren’t interested at all in studying or learning, and they were dumb as hell already; I was confused as to how uncaring and un-self-aware they can be! ‘I don’t deserve to be in this university’ I said to myself. Unfortunately, people don’t usually get what they think they deserve, they get what they get. Luck happens to us all. About four years later now, I have graduated from my university, and all the worries of that time seem so futile and distant. Oscar Wilde was right in saying that ‘the only charmful thing about the past is that it is the past.’
But this book, amidst my cramped head and frowned eyebrows of that particular autumn in 2017, managed to make me laugh. It made me laugh out loud even – as in LOL for real. Now that I’ve reread it, I can confidently remember that it was one of Asya Kanaznci’s uncle’s unusual, therefore hilarious death in prison that made me laugh: while climbing on the fence to get a better view of the fight between the other in-mates, the prisoned Kazanci man dies after getting electrocuted. Sitting outside a bad-looking gym where my friends went to work-out, I remember reading this particular scene under the lamppost, while mosquitoes buzzing and biting me, and bursting into a modest outward laugh… True to my memory, I did find this novel upon rereading it, among many other things, also funny. Be it Asya’s sarcasm, or the Kazanci family’s complicated and contradictory women situation, which produced such piercing and funny satire in Asya.
But before getting any further, let’s lay out the plot of the novel first (and although I did post online my review of rereading Roy’s novel, I’m sure no one would read it, therefore no unexpected spoilers). The novel starts on a pouring Friday in Istanbul, where the frustrated nineteen-years-old Zeliha is on her way for an abortion. She’s frustrated because it is raining cats and dogs and it is all muddy; also because she’s wearing high-heels, and miniskirt, and nose ring, and a taxi driver stops to harass her amid bazaar. Later on, we meet Zeliha’s all-women family: her elder sisters: Banu, Ceviry, and Feride, as well as her mother Gulsum and her grandmother, Petite-Ma. All the Kazanci men (their family surname) tend to die of one reason or another, like getting electrocuted in prison. Yet Zeliha’s younger brother, Mustafa, still lives, but far away in Arizona, USA, where he was sent for college – and also to get away from the curse on the men of the family.
After the character-full and absorbing first chapter, Shafak introduces even more female characters in the second chapter, making it even more complicated to follow. We meet Rose, an American woman from Arizona, now divorced from her Armenian husband, Barsam. The reason for their divorce: Barsam’s populated family of women. Rose meets Mustafa at a supermarket while shopping for groceries, and upon learning that he is a Turk, plans to take a revenge of Barsam’s Armenian family by marrying Mustafa. Herein lies the backbone of this novel: the present-day conflict and the ugly history between the Turks and Armenians. During the first world war in 1915, the then declining Ottoman empire massacres and exiles the whole of Armenians from their homeland, ending up killing two million Armenians. Yet the present-day Turks, either denies this history or at least detaches themselves from the atrocities of the Ottoman empire that now exists no more. Anyways, after a 19 years jump in the novel, we meet Asya, Zeliha’s daughter whom she couldn’t abort on that Friday in Istanbul. A nihilist, sarcastic, big-breasted and un-obeying girl like her mother, except that she isn’t at all as pretty as her mother. Rose’s daughter from Barsam is also nineteen years old now, named Amy for short. A conflicted girl from the Armenian father and a stepdaughter of a Turk, she plans to visit Istanbul to in order to see for herself her grandmother’s house she left there and to see if the Turks are really as barbaric as she’s told. Once there in Istanbul, she goes to her stepfather’s house to stay, where she meets Asya and the history of Turks and Armenia, as well as the fates of her immediate family.
Entangled, right? But don’t worry, Shafak has handled this story brilliantly, despite being political and controversial as always. Besides the Turk-Armenia narrative and how Asya with her Café Kundera friends and Amy with her online chatroom friends converge in it, there an atmospheric and dark secret lurking around throughout the novel, which when revealed toward the end, shocks one to the core.
On the lighter note though, there is food. Lots of it. Shafak has robustly brought her Turkic culture on display throughout this novel; with the chapters being named after ingredients and lots of Turkic cuisine being cooked, smelled, and eaten throughout the novel. Then there’s also Milan Kundera, the mutual favorite writer of everyone inside and outside the novel: theories about why the Café Kundera, which Asya visits, was named after the Czech writer, or Kundera’s themes of lightness and boredom, or the fact that Shafak creates a Kundera-ic scene where a naked Asya is being sketched by her married Cartoonist lover.
The mixture of the darker and lighter themes in this novel, the laughters and the goose-bumps, and Shafak’s natural ability to incorporate in all so befittingly into the plot makes this a great, great read.
There’s an education on offer in Shafak’s novel, be it a historical one or one that opens our eyes to what’s happening around us. To shun topics which irks us or makes us uncomfortable, or to taboo them, is never the way to progress over and pierce through them, it is only through open, patient, and pointed discussions that we can dissect and understand what is it that bothers us and now to make peace with it. Closing our eyes to the ugly things won’t make them go away, it will only press them deeper into our shared consciousness. I admire what Shafak does with her novels: she talks about these ugly truths, albeit controversial or provocative, she unveils what is usually intentionally kept away from us; through her books she lets the readers in on cultural secrets, raw conversations that might never take place, and makes us confront ourselves with our own individual and collective nature as human beings – she gives us a chance to be better, again.
February 18, 2022_