The Bastard of Istanbul

Asya Kazancı grows up in an Istanbul household of women, her aunts Cevriye, Feride, and Banu, her grandmother Gülsüm, and her mother Zeliha, who raised her more as a family project than as an acknowledged daughter, since no one in the house will say who Asya's father is. Across the Atlantic, Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian is raised inside an Armenian-American family whose diaspora identity is organized entirely around remembering 1915, generations of an American upbringing pressed hard against grandparents who insist she recite her family history like scripture. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul to see the city her family was driven from, she moves into the Kazancı household through her stepfather Mustafa, Zeliha's long-absent brother, without either family realizing yet how directly their histories are already knotted together.

Shafak stages the Armenian genocide as the fault line the two households handle in opposite ways, the Tchakhmakhchians treating memory as an inheritance owed to the dead, the Kazancı women having absorbed, without ever quite deciding to, a Turkish habit of not naming what happened at all. Asya's own creed, a personal manifesto of belonging to nothing, refusing nation, family, or cause alike, reads at first as generational nihilism and gradually as the psychologically logical response to being raised inside a house built entirely on things left unsaid.

Banu's fortune-telling, aided by two djinns she keeps as informants on the family's past, gives the novel license to surface the buried Kazancı history through something other than confession, and the aşure Banu prepares near the novel's end, a pudding traditionally made from whatever grains and dried fruit are left in the pantry, becomes Shafak's clearest image for the book's argument: that a family, like a nation, survives on what it has managed to save from disaster and is willing to mix together rather than sort out.

Months after publication, Shafak was charged under Turkey's Article 301 for denigrating Turkishness, not for anything written in her own voice but for lines given to her fictional Armenian characters describing the massacres of 1915. The trial, which drew international attention to Turkey's speech laws, ended in acquittal after less than two hours, but the fact that a novel's dialogue could be treated as courtroom evidence became, for readers on both sides of the border the book is set across, part of the story of what The Bastard of Istanbul actually did.