Alisa Gevorgyan
“Radiolur”
The Armenian edition of famous Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s book “The Bastard of Istanbul” has been released. It has been translated by Maro Madoyan-Alajajyan. Shafak’s book attracted her not only with its sincerity and deepness, but also with the great literary value.
“It makes the reader think deeper about issues of the Armenian Genocide. It raises questions, which Turkey usually keeps silent about,” Maro Madoyan-Alajajyan told a press conference in Yerevan.
“The Bastard of Istanbul” is Shafak’s second English-language book, which has been translated into nearly 30 languages. After the book was published in 2008, Elif Shafak was sued under the unpopular Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code for “insulting Turkishness.”
The Armenian edition of the book will be presented at the Arno Babajanyan Concert Hall on May 30.
The author of the book does not conceal her true objective of reconciling the two parties. At the same time she tries to find an answer to the question of whether the sons are responsible for the crime committed by their fathers. Which is the way out, when the perpetrators are gone, but the wounds are still there? Shafak has no definite answer to these questions, but she understands that silence and denial will bring no solution to the issue.
Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul is a tale of an extraordinary family curse and clashing cultural identities in the mystical and mysterious city of Istanbul.
One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor’s surgery. ‘I need to have an abortion’, she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life.
Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya’s beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster.
And when Asya’s Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long hidden family secrets connected with Turkey’s turbulent past begin to emerge.
