Elif Shafak

[b:10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World|43706466|10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World|Elif Shafak|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1556019023l/43706466._SY75_.jpg|68011919] tells of the imagined last minutes of brain function, even after the murdered protagonist's heart has stopped. She recalls her life, her childhood in Van, Turkey, her move to Istanbul to escape sexual abuse, becoming a prostitute, her great love, D/Ali, and her five dear friends who support her in life and death. The friends are all displaced refugees and survivors of intolerance and poverty in a city which once strived to be a rich brew of many religions and lifestyles. The writing is exquisite, poetic and lively, even funny at times. The characters are richly realized. Ever present is its setting, the book is also a paean to the City of Istanbul. I was sorry to reach the end as it provided an addictive escape from pandemic election preoccupation.… (mais)

In the last month three of the books I've read have had Reese's Book Club stickers on them. It's not that I've been consciously trying to read them; in fact, until this past month I don't know if I have ever looked at the Reese's Book Club web site. But now that I know that I seem to like these picks I think I'll have to keep closer tabs on them.

This book has a little bit of everything: romance, grief, war, death, nature, teenage angst, three time lines and a tree narrator. And yet it's not chaotic. Every piece seems quite necessary. Cyprus is the island in the title and much of the book takes place there. However, London is where the book opens. Ada Kazantzakis is in the last class before Christmas break but, unlike the other students, she's not looking forward to the break. She is still grieving for her mother and so is her father. Plus being of mixed Greek and Turk blood, they've never really gone in for religion. Suddenly, Ada starts screaming at the top of her lungs and won't stop until her throat is absolutely unable to make another sound. Ada's father, Kostas, rushes to the school leaving his beloved fig tree only partially buried, a task he wanted to accomplish before a bad storm hit England. Ada doesn't want to talk about the incident partly because she is embarrassed and partly because she doesn't know why she did it. She wonders if there is some mental instability in the family and she dreads going back to school after the break. The looming break sounds like it will be awful but then, out of the blue, her mother's sister Meryem turns up. Meryem had never met her niece and Ada isn't disposed to like her because she didn't come for her mother's funeral. Learning why this is so necessitates going back to 1974 and to Nicosia in Cyprus where Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, fell in love . They had to meet in secret, obviously, so the owners of The Happy Fig restaurant, who were themselves a mixed couple, let them come to a small back room in the restaurant. The place got its name because a big fig tree grew in the centre of the establishment. Years later, Kostas took a slip of this fig tree and smuggled it to London where he planted it in their garden. This is the fig tree that he was trying to save from the big storm when he got called to Ada's school. Kostas and Defne were separated by the civil war of 1974 but years later they were reunited. By this time Kostas was a well-known scientist who understands the symbiotic relationship between trees, animals, and insects and Defne was an archaeologist involved with finding the bodies of people killed during the civil war. Of course, the reader discovers these things bit by bit from the fig tree and from Ada's conversations with her aunt. Ada and Meryam become close which facilitates Ada's coming to terms with her mother's death and the shame of her screaming outburst.

I loved the fig tree's narration of some of the story. It's such a clever way to disclose plot elements. And, if you were worried about whether the fig tree survived, never fret.… (mais)

Three protagonists linked by two rivers, the water cycle and a lost culture make for an intriguing yet complex narrative structure. Shafak challenges her readers to contemplate how water, a tiny but vital molecule, travels through time and space without regard for human endeavors. Along the way, she links water to larger issues like racism (class and ethnic cleansing), memory (lost ancient Middle Eastern artifacts and literature), and climate change (hidden and polluted urban rivers and the cultural impact of damming to contend with desertification).

King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums is a 19th century boy born into poverty beside a polluted Thames River. He is named by the people who made their living retrieving artifacts discarded into the river. This occupation foreshadows Arthur’s future because, not unlike the Dickens characters he resembles, he has “great expectations.” He is a brilliant introvert who rises from grinding poverty to discover a calling excavating and translating cuneiform tablet shards from the destroyed city if Nineveh. Recovering an ancient poem— “Epic of Gilgamesh”— becomes his fatal obsession. That text was lost when the Mesopotamian library of King Ashurbanipal was flooded.

The second story is about a Yazidi girl named Narin. In some respects, this is the opaquest of the three stories. The traditions, history, and homelands of this obscure Kurdish sect are central to this story, yet it leaves much detail out. It is understandable that this long book required some editing, but it is unfortunate to have to resort to Google to follow it. Simply put, Narin’s mother is dead, and her father is away a lot as a travelling musician. Her religious grandmother is her primary caregiver. Narin is suffering from progressive deafness and her grandmother is intent of getting her baptized on sacred ground. Dam building on the Tigris leads to the flooding of their homeland. This necessitates travel to a distant sacred site that is hostile to the Yazidi people. This results in unfortunate consequences for Narin and her family.

Zaleekhah is a young hydrological scientist renting a houseboat on the newly restored Thames. Suffering from depression because of the breakup of her marriage, she develops a romantic relationship with her female landlord, who is a tattoo artist working in cuneiform decorations. This coincidence seems to be a stretch to link the three stories. In another case of heavy-handed foreshadowing, one also learns that Zaleekhah’s parents died in an Egyptian flash flood. She was raised in luxury by a loving, but meddling uncle. Her niece requires a kidney transplant— reminiscent of Narin’s deafness—an event that leads to dire consequences for her relationship with her uncle.

Shafak merges these three plots in a satisfying, yet unsurprising conclusion. Notwithstanding a few places where she may have hammered the puzzle pieces to make the stories fit better, this is a well-researched and engaging piece of historical fiction filled with obscure facts and a cast of realistic, nuanced characters.… (mais)

“If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.”

Island of Missing Trees is a beautiful, lyrical book written by Turkish author Elif Shafak. It has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year 2022, RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The story shifts between teenage Ada Kazantzakis living in London in the 2010s, and her parents’ lives on the troubled island of Cyprus in 1974. One of the narrators is a fig tree transplanted from Cyprus to England, bringing some ecological wisdom and insight into the story with lines like, “I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and where someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusion. For us, everything is interconnected.”

I read this book as the August selection for our book club and as part of my round the world reading challenge. Cyprus has been the site of civil war and unrest due to tensions between the majority Christian Greek Cypriot population in the south and the Muslim Turkish Cypriot population in the north. In 1974 a coup d’état by Greek Cypriot nationalists attempted to gain enosis or union with Greece. This prompted an invasion of Northern Cyprus by Turkey, displacing over 200,000 people. The island became divided, with a UN buffer zone running right through the capital city Nicosia. In the middle of this unlikely environment a romance blossoms between Kostas and Defne, a romance that neither of their families will accept as they are on the opposite sides of both the racial and religious divide. They secretly meet at the Happy Fig taverna under the watchful eye of the majestic fig and the kindly tavern owners Yusuf and Yiorgos.

After a dramatic event at school Ada tries to understand the family secrets and sorrows that have always been hidden from her in an attempt to shield her from the suffering. When the dynamic Aunt Meryem visits, Ada finally begins to learn some of the story. Aunt Meryem is also a fount of superstition, folklore, recipes and a collection of her own colourful proverbs such as, “The world is unfair…If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg.”

The story was a gentle exploration of the impacts of suffering and loss, the power of love and hope in the face of hardship, and the need for remembrance and closure. 5 stars for me.… (mais)