The Bastard of Istanbul

by Elif Shafak

By now she knew too well that being a member of the Kazancı family meant, among other things, professing the alchemy of absurdity, continually converting nonsense into some sort of logic with which you could convince everyone, and with a little push, even yourself.

If you couldn’t help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as if you had been de-energized and now had only enough strength to be average.

The Janissary’s Paradox is being torn between two clashing states of existence. On the one hand, the remnants of the past pile up—a womb of tenderness and sorrow, a sense of injustice and discrimination. On the other hand glimmers the promised future—a shelter decorated with the trimmings and trappings of success, a sense of safety like you have never had before, the comfort of joining the majority and finally being deemed normal.

The overwhelming majority of people never think and those who think never become the overwhelming majority. Choose your side.

If you have no reason or ability to be, then just endure.

If blasphemy, more or less like breast cancer or diabetes, was genetically passed on from mother to daughter, what was the use of trying to correct it?

She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such notion of continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.

Halfway through her second Diet Coke, Armanoush asked Asya what kind of books she read, since fiction was her main connection with the entire world.

Then she murmured, “You’re fascinated with history.” “And you aren’t?” drawled Armanoush, her voice conveying both disbelief and scorn. “What’s the use of it?” was Asya’s curt answer. “Why should I know anything about the past? Memories are too much of a burden.”

For the record, I think knowing history is essential. IMHO, Asya is a shallow fool.

So I say to myself, why do you want to unearth the secrets? Don’t you see that the past is a vicious circle? It is a loop. It sucks us in and makes us run like a hamster on a wheel. Then we start to repeat ourselves, again and again.”

Omg, Asya is stupid! She thinks she is original, and all she is is a typical rebel without a cause, thinking rebellion defines her as being free of definition instead of seeing she is trapped inside another philosophical paradigm.

This place was about fixations, repetitions, and obsessions; it was for those who didn’t want to have anything to do with the bigger picture, if there indeed was such a thing.

Cafe Kundera - and for the record I HATE Kundera's novels because he is SO exactly as this sentence describes Cafe Kundera as he is as a writer with fixations on anuses and pooping and female bodily secretions and his WRONG-HEADED idea of women's supposed fixation on Love over Self-respect or Education.

The constant tension between vulgar reality and treacherous fantasy, the notion of the outside people versus us people inside, the dreamlike quality of the place, and finally, the sullen expression on the men’s faces, as if they were desperately ruminating on what to choose—either to carry the weight of disheveled love affairs or become half real with lightness—everything evoked a scene out of a Kundera novel.

The author nailed it! God, how I despise Kundera!

How much of what was happening here should she reveal to them?

I positively HATE people who think censorship is how they should respond to reality.

So you are saying he might go to prison for drawing the prime minister as a wolf?

Come on, guys, there is nothing cool or that interesting either in him or in any other character at that dingy cafe. Don’t you see, they are all faces and names from the bohemian, avant-gardist, arty-farty side of Istanbul. Typical third world country elite who hate themselves more than anything else in the world. Armanoush winced at this sharp message from Baron Baghdassarian and looked around.

The Baron is missing the entire fricking point. Prison for expressing any contrary opinions was the gd point, not how politically correct an opinion is expressed. The Baron apparently cares more about whether political clothing is appropriately worn, instead of actual facts on the ground and subsequent suffering.

To her way of thinking, anyone who can’t rise up and rebel, anyone devoid of the ability to dissent, cannot really be said to be alive. In resistance lies the key to life. The rest of the people fall into two camps: the vegetables, who are fine with everything, and the tea glasses, who, though not fine with numerous things, lack the strength to confront. It is the latter that are the worse of the two.

Agree.

The Iron Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: If you are as fragile as a tea glass, either find a way to never encounter burning water and hope to marry an ideal husband or get yourself laid and broken as soon as possible. Alternatively, stop being a tea-glass woman!

“But don’t you think there is a huge difference between the two sexes when it comes to recovery after an affair? I mean, when women survive an awful marriage or love affair, and all that shit, they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however, it is just the opposite; the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

TRUTH.

The oppressor has no use for the past. The oppressed has nothing but the past,

So you say, Lady Peacock/Siramark wrote. We R all born into continuity in time and the past continues to live within the present. We come from a family line, a culture, a nation. Are you gonna say let bygones be bygones?

Am I responsible for my father’s crime? A Girl Named Turk asked. You are responsible for recognizing your father’s crime, Anti-Khavurma replied.

“If we had more women in the parliament everything would be different,”

Family stories intermingle in such ways that what happened generations ago can have an impact on seemingly irrelevant developments of the present day. The past is anything but bygone.

Between the Turkish edition and the English edition of this novel in 2006, I was put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The charges that were brought against me were due to the words that some of the Armenian characters spoke in the novel; I could have been given up to a three-year prison sentence, but the charges were eventually dropped. During this time, I have been fortunate enough to receive enormous support from so many people, friends, and strangers alike, of such different nationalities and religions. I