When Turkey?s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told a Swiss journalist that ?30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it,? he was put on trial for ?insulting? Turkishness. Fellow novelist Elif Shafak was put on the stands too because one of the characters in her second English novel The Bastard of Istanbul has a family of Armenians talking about them being ?genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915?? She was promptly sued by right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who had also sued Pamuk and a host of others for hurting Turkey?s sensibilities. Both Pamuk and Shafak were spared of doing time in prison.
But at least in Shafak?s case, she ended up being discussed much more than the book. And thereby hangs a tale. Shafak, who had showed a lot of promise in her first English novel, The Flea Palace, doesn?t quite live up to her reputation in this one. Though the premise is fiery enough ? it?s set across two countries, the US and Turkey, and follows two families, the Turkish one living in Istanbul, and the Armenian one living in America ? and enough twists and turns befitting a potboiler, it doesn?t necessarily convert into a good read.
But first the story. Mustafa, Turkish, studying in America falls in love with an American, Rose, who is divorced from her Armenian husband. Rose is particularly happy to take sweet revenge on her Armenian in-laws because her daughter Armanoush will be brought up by a Turkish father. When she grows up to be 21, Armanoush, who has always been in touch with her Armenian roots, strangely wants to go to Istanbul (but Armenians don?t live there anymore, right?). She stays with her stepfather?s family, and stumbles onto a difficult secret.
The Turkish family of four generations, including the eldest suffering from Alzheimer?s and the youngest running a tattoo parlour and mother of a ?bastard? daughter from where Shafak picks the title, keeps Armanoush busy. She goes through a roller-coaster experience, not least because of the sight and sounds of Istanbul?s streets, the incessant shouting, bullying, haranguing that takes place there. She learns why her stepfather has kept himself safe, till now that is, in America ? the men of the family ?for generations? had died young?.
If Mustafa?s misdeed ? he rapes his sister ? is a metaphor for Turkey?s consistent denial of genocide, it doesn?t quite work. Because thanks to historians and the Armenian diaspora themselves, the Armenian genocide is known. It?s not kept a secret like Mustafa?s sister does the rape. Though Shafak fills her novel with sentences like ? ?Istanbul is a hodgepodge of 10 million lives. It is an open book of ten million scrambled stories.? ? she will have to do better than this to take on Pamuk.
