Tag-Archive for ◊ irony ◊

Author:
• Sunday, February 02nd, 2014

Elif Shafak was born in 1971 to Turkish parents, a philosopher father and a diplomat mother, in Strasbourg, France. Her parents divorced when she was one year old and she returned to Turkey with her mother, which left an imprint on her life. A single child raised by a single divorcee mother was an unusual situation in a patriarchal environment in Ankara in the early 1970s.

Shafak lived between her traditionalist, irrational, superstitious grandmother in Ankara and her well educated, feminist, westernised, diplomat mother, abroad. She travelled all over the world which made her a multicultural and cosmopolitan person in her life and in her writing, combining eastern and western cultures as well as traditions in her novels.

Shafak writes in Turkish and English and is the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into many languages. She has won Turkish literary awards and has received several prestigious international prizes, one of them being the French honorary distinction of Chevalier des arts et des lettres in 2010.

Shafak is also a political Scientist and assistant professor. She obtained a Masters degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Her Master’s thesis on Islam, Women and Mysticism received an award from the Social Scientists Institute. She has been a teacher at various universities all over the world.

Shafak writes for a number of daily and monthly publications in Turkey and has contributed to several newspapers in Europe and in the USA as well as writing lyrics for Turkish musicians.

She lives with her two young children and Turkish husband who works as editor-in-chief for an Istanbul newspaper. She divides her time between Istanbul – the Turkish city that she is very attached to and which takes a central part in her novels – and London.

Her book, Honour, was written in English and published in 2012.

Adem Toprak is from Istanbul and his Kurdish wife, Pembe, was born and raised in a small, remote, roadless village called Mala çar Bayan located near the river Euphrates. Pembe has always longed to travel and after her marriage she moves to Istanbul, where her two children, Eskender and Esma were born. Her wish is fulfilled when her husband decides to emigrate with the family to 1970s bustling London, before the arrival of their third child Yunus.

Once in London, Adem and Pembe want to believe in love and freedom but deep inside they can’t get rid of, nor leave behind, their entrenched resistance to adapt to a different culture, nor their ingrained perception of betrayal, shame and honour.

Honour is the story of three generations of a Turkish and Kurdish family. Through the various narrators and viewpoints, the author is juxtaposing eastern and western cultures as well as conservative and modern societies.

The story revolves between Turkey and London. It starts with Esma and ends with her. Esma is the second Toprak child, a bright student. She is ambitious, independent, strong headed and destined to a bright future. The irony is that after her studies and her ambitious dreams, she ends up like her mother as a housewife. Esma has now two twin daughters following her marriage to the considerate and caring Palestinian immigrant scientific scholar, Nadir.

Yunus and Nadir become good friends. After sharing some thrills with a group of punk squatters, that he came across by chance in his early teens, Yunus becomes a successful musician with a band.
Throughout the story the author emphasizes the three siblings’ – Eskender, Esma and Yunus – different degrees of adaptation to the western world. Each one of them trying to adapt in his own way and according to the circumstances they are facing.

Feeling uprooted and lost in his new adopted country, Adem, the head of the family, has been brought up by an “at times sober, sweet and kind and at times drunken, evil and violent” father and a submissive mother who disappears out of his life at an early age. Having had this unsettled and insecure upbringing, Adem, once in London becomes an addicted gambler. He spends all his money to satisfy the needs of his Bulgarian lover, Roxana, the dancer. He eventually abandons his wife, Pembe and his three children without any income to survive on.

Adem’s wife Pembe, who is a determined and yet vulnerable character, feels just as displaced and disoriented as her husband. She finds a job in a hair-dressing saloon and finds solace in writing letters to her identical twin sister, Jamila.

Jamila, never marries – because her honour has been besmirched when kidnapped as a young girl through no fault of her own – and is living secluded in a remote place in Turkey. She becomes a midwife and a healer. She has a psychic connection with her identical twin sister and is an important character in the plot’s twist at the end of the story.

With her husband having run away with another woman, leaving her to bring-up their three children, Pembe establishes an innocent, secret relationship with a Greek cook, which will lead to her demise and lead her son Eskender to Shrewsbury prison after committing his irreparable crime by killing her for it. Eskender finds it difficult to embrace two cultures at once. He is a sympathetic character as an adult, when he is tortured by guilt and remorse and feels repentant for committing his heinous crime. Previously he was a confused teenager trying hard to find the right path on his own. He was young, without a father to guide him and with a mother who spoilt him and called him her “sultan”.

Eskender considers his mother’s irreproachable friendship with a man to be a crime and only by killing her can he restore the Toprak family honour, since his father will not undertake this task himself. Pembe has to die like her eldest sister, Hediye, who died, hanged by her family, many years earlier, for having eloped and then been forsaken by a young medical assistant.

In the novel, the author underlines that for some communities the only answer to restoring the family’s honour is death and that this code of honour is carried forward from generation to generation.

Honour has several themes: patriarchal societies, immigration, the search of identity, multiculturalism and honour code as well as honour killing – which today is still alive and well in various tribal communities all over the world. Just as domestic violence against women is also increasingly spreading all over the eastern and western world.

If you enjoyed reading this article or found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a cup of coffee to help maintain the site...
Author:
• Saturday, March 03rd, 2007

I’m starting my book reviews with two books by two different authors. One is Italian, Alessandro Baricco, born in Turin in 1958 for his book “Silk”. The other book is “The Alchemist” by Brazilian, Paulo Coelho, born in Rio de Janeiro on 24th August 1947. Although they are very different books, they do have a common thread…

Alessandro Baricco wrote the best seller “Silk”, the story of a French silkworm merchant, Hervé Joncour, who travels to Japan on business around 1861. While there, he meets a woman “who does not have oriental eyes” in the residence of a strange Japanese nobleman.

He falls madly in love with this woman without communicating with her. He can not even read the note she sends him in Japanese. He continues travelling to Japan on business but only in the hope of seeing this mysterious woman again.

His own wife, who finds out the truth about his trips to Japan, keeps very quiet, goes to a Japanese lady living in France and seeks her help. Her letter in French gets translated into Japanese and sent to her husband who believes that it comes from his loved one in Japan.

After Mme. Joncour’s death, the husband goes to the same Japanese translator to have his letter translated into French. The letter is erotic, the way Joncour likes it. He seems to have been looking for a passionate, erotic relationship, the kind that he believed could be found in exotic countries like Japan, a country very far away from France. But the irony of life will show him after it’s too late, since his wife meantime died, that what he was looking for was not further than his own home: his wife.

The Japanese lady tells Joncour: “When she came to me she had already written it. She asked me to copy it out in Japanese. And I did so. That is the truth. You know Monsieur, I believe that she would have wanted, more than anything in the world, to have been that woman. You can’t understand. But I heard her read that letter. I know.”

In “The Alchemist” Paulo Coelho tells the story of Santiago, the young Andalusian shepherd, who dreams of a buried treasure in Egypt. From then on all the challenges start.

Santiago travels. He meets an old man who tells him: “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.” Follow your intuitions, he was told.

The message is simple, but not easy to see or hear in the hustle of everyday life. He persists and overcomes all the hardships he meets in order to reach his target.

He goes from country to country in order to find out in the end that the treasure he was looking for was buried under the sycamore tree in the garden of his own home: “He thought of the many roads he had travelled and of the strange way God had chosen to show him his treasure.”

Isn’t it ironic that throughout all the ages, human nature seeks complicated ways to reach its target, before stopping to reflect that maybe the very thing needed is already within reach.