The Wrong Way to End: Squeamish About
The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak
***
First of all, Elif Shafak is
a woman writer and to all intents and purposes a feminist, so I want to like
her book. She’s also a good writer, and it shows in The Bastard of Istanbul; the first chapter alone is a tour de force: a page-turner with a
twist-in-the-tail ending. The shape of the first chapter in essence resembles
the shape of the novel, which is, like its opening chapter, a compelling story
about the value of a human life, of human lives. Microcosm, macrocosm.
Endings do matter. They
matter a lot. In fact it is difficult to impossible to overlook the negative
impact – no, let me say what I mean here – the emotional damage that can be
inflicted by an adverse ending. By ‘adverse ending’ I don’t mean a bad ending. Hamlet has a bad ending that feels
right. That pile of dead bodies on the stage belongs there. No, I’m talking
about a bad ending that’s just so wrong. And
how do I know when an ending is wrong? The same way you do.
You know it in your gut.
Olive Comes to a Bad End
Take, for example, the end
of Series Two of the British Television show “The Cut.” Watched it months ago,
and still have fantasies of avenging the murder of Olive
– by doing something equally murderous to whoever – screenwriter, director, producer
– decided to kill off my favorite character, and in such a cruel way.
Murderous feelings: that
sounds a bit intense, doesn’t it? But you should know that Olive, screen-age
fifteen, is the deep-pondering, deep-feeling, winsome heroine of the story, beautifully
acted by Billie North. A loyal friend, a stalwart of the working class in a neighborhood
undergoing rapid gentrification, Olive is an
orphan. We’re talking heavy-duty Dickensian depiction here. You’d better
think twice before you dispatch an orphan.
And there’s more. Olive is
the romantic heroine of the piece: love-object of the brooding Stephen, whose
parents are embroiled in a multi-generational feud with Olive’s people – and,
oh! the obstacles to the love of Stephen for Olive and Olive for Stephen! It
was breaking all the rules to kill off such a heroine in such a way. Without regard for the tender-hearted feelings of
the audience. You just do not do that.
I suppose they thought it
was possible to ignore unwritten rules like: “Thou shalt not, in the instance
of a truly good character who suffers
great adversity, kill off that character for no good reason, especially in a
sadistic manner.” You can tell I’m still mad about this, can’t you? Olive’s
friends on “The Cut” may have finished grieving for her (what choice do they
have?) but my grief is not done. For Olive didn’t take poison like Juliet. She
wasn’t killed by some other character onto whom we might have shifted our
anger. No, true to her nature, Olive was simply trying to do a good deed when
she slipped and fell from the roof of a three-story building. The lovely Olive.
Talking about Endings: Taboo!
I seem to be preoccupied
these days with endings. And of course there is a taboo about talking about the
ends of stories, whether these are in books or films. To speak is a sin. We
even have the term “spoiler,” not so much to designate the person who gives
away the secret, the climactic revelation, as to activate a noisy alert system:
bells! whistles! to protect the unsuspecting reader. Protect from what?
Presumably, from having one’s experience of absorption, of suspense, modified
by foreknowledge. Surely that foreknowledge doesn’t interfere with an
appreciation of the writer’s skill in unraveling the plot? Well no (upholders
of the taboo concede), but it interferes with our enjoyment, with the pleasure
we take in predicting outcomes. Indeed, we want our first reading to be virgin.
Not to speak, to be silent
about endings, would be difficult enough regarding most modern novels given
their complexity. Recently though, authors treating the novel like a short
story, perhaps one by Maupassant, have given it a turnabout ending: a surprise,
a verbal whiplash that changes everything that went before. Moreover, in some
instances the surprise of the ending goes beyond technical mastery, and has a
truly transformative impact on the novel’s themes and on our understanding of
the novel as a whole. To refrain from discussing the ending then, in the
interest of suspense, means not really being free to talk fully about the
meaning of the book.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
OK, a few specific examples
are in order (may as well be caught for a sheep as for a lamb.) Salman
Rushdie’s hung showdown at the end of Shalimar
the Clown––a duel between Shalimar and Kashmira––symbolically places the
Indian subcontinent in perfect equipoise between Hindu and Muslim, sacred and
secular, terror and justice. Zoë Wicomb’s surprise ending in Playing in the Light causes the reader
to reconsider the relative importance of two characters: Marion and Brenda.[1]
In Nick Laird’s novel, Glover’s Mistake, romantic
lead Glover is prodded by his jealous roommate into making a fatal mistake.
Glover strikes his fiancée, Ruth, and we are reminded of a conversation in a
bar, early in the novel, that turns out to be prophetic. There is a double
surprise in store at the end of A.B. Yehoshua’s The Retrospective.[2]
Turnabouts in style and plot wholly
transform the novel. In what story writer Grace Paley would call Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Yehoshua’s
narrative makes a precipitous leap from Realism into Fantasy, as an aging
filmmaker finds unexpected redemption in a meeting with Don Quixote.
All of these endings––endings
that must be talked about if one is to talk about the novel––are right, in some
cases, surpassingly so.
What about nasty surprises?
What about endings that feel wrong?
I knew the end of Series Two
of “The Cut” was wrong by the strong emotions – primarily anger and indignation
– that were aroused at the time of viewing it and when thinking about it retrospectively.
The ending of Elif Shafak’s The Bastard
of Istanbul did not arouse feelings of outrage; rather it stimulated a kind
of discomfort that I can best describe as squeamishness.
What's Cooking?
The Bastard of Istanbul is one of those novels by women––I think the trend
began with Like Water for Chocolate––that
is full of food and often the recipes to make it. In Shafak’s novel there is a
tantalizing Turkish or Armenian dish in nearly every chapter. This of course
arouses in the reader a festive, sybaritic state of mind, an expectation of
enjoying the narrative as much as, and in the same way as, the characters enjoy their food. If you enjoy our food,
the characters seem to promise, you will enjoy our story! And who would not
enjoy such food?
In addition to food and food
preparation, The Bastard of Istanbul features
special ingredients, at the rate of one per chapter. Thus we have, in Chapters
1-5, dishes featuring: cinnamon, garbanzo beans, sugar, roasted hazelnuts, and
vanilla.
Yet in spite of all this
good eating, the two families profiled in Shafak’s novel are not happy families.
What's Missing?
The Turkish family of nineteen
year-old Asya Kazanci, the titular character, is unhappy because there is a curse
on the male members of the family, and few have survived. The situation of the
women in the family is analogous to that of factory supervisor Anna Akimovna in
Chekhov’s story “A Woman’s Kingdom,” (Babe tsarstvo 1894).
Chekhov’s story too is about
the absence of men. It is a story about procreation, or the lack of it. The
factory where Anna Akimovna works is a little world that cannot supply her with
a suitable mate. Anna’s biological clock is ticking, and so are the clocks all
around her. At Christmas, she meets the watchmaker, Pimenov:
She asked Pimenov, her acquaintance of the previous day:
"Why have you so many clocks in your room?"
"I mend clocks," he answered. "I take the work up between times, on holidays, or when I can't sleep."
"So if my watch goes wrong I can bring it to you to be repaired?" Anna Akimovna asked, laughing.
"To be sure, I will do it with pleasure," said Pimenov, and there was an expression of tender devotion in his face, when, not herself knowing why, she unfastened her magnificent watch from its chain and handed it to him; he looked at it in silence and gave it back. "To be sure, I will do it with pleasure," he repeated. "I don't mend watches now. My eyes are weak, and the doctors have forbidden me to do fine work. But for you I can make an exception."
There is something amiss with Time. There is something amiss with the time of her life. Can Pimenov fix it?
Just so the Kazancis. In
the absence of fathers, husbands, and brothers, who mysteriously die off, this
matriarchal clan has the peaceable autonomy of a little kingdom. Yet within
this peaceable kingdom something is amiss. Can the unexplained attrition of men
be fixed?
The other profiled family,
an Armenian family living in America, is unhappy for other reasons. Like the Chinese
in Indonesia, like the Tutsis in Rwanda, like the Jews nearly everywhere, they
have been punished for their economic success, for their skill as merchants,
for finding and transporting and selling the goods everyone wants to buy.
Though the Armenian genocide took place from 1915-1923, this late 20th
century Armenian family is still painfully diminished by it. Yet the Tchakhmakhchian family does manage to
produce one lovely daughter, Armanoush.
Lovely Daughters
And Armanoush is the cousin
of the Kazanci family’s one lovely daughter, Asya. A child of obscure
paternity, Asya is, of course, the “bastard” of Istanbul.
Armanoush and Asya meet up
in Turkey, where they share lovingly prepared family dishes and communicate
about the hidden Armenian genocide, and
other hidden things.
What is all this cuisine and
divulging of secrets leading up to? What nasty surprise awaits these young
women?
Did I mention that the one
surviving Kazanci male, Asya’s “Uncle Mustafa” and the stepfather of Armanoush,
had absented himself from Turkey around the time of Asya’s birth?
Ending with a Nasty Surprise, or Two
As to the nasty surprise
that awaits. Since, roughly, the 1980s, that nasty surprise, that family
secret, has been one and the same. In Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), an
incestuous father despoils two of his three daughters. In Jonathan Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), a sister and brother screw around the
clock to break their bad habit. In a more nuanced depiction of sibling incest,
Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), the author explains the compulsion as
a form of narcissism. In A.B. Yehoshua’s Mr.
Mani (1989), such a secret haunts
several generations. With the exception of thoughtful books like those by
Irving and Lively, [and leaving aside French films like Cousin Cousine (Cousin, Cousin, Jean-Charles Tacchella, 1975) and Le Souffle au Coeur (Heart Murmur, Louis
Malle, 1971), which made a cousinly obsession and a boy’s sexual initiation by
his mother seem like jolly, inconsequential romps] literary incest is most
often numbered among the sins of the patriarchy. And retribution awaits.
So when the culpable
Mustapha returns to Istanbul, and Asya’s parentage is revealed: a rape, the
only question that remains is what form retribution will take. Since we have by
now reached Chapter 18, and the special ingredient listed is Potassium Cyanide,
you can easily imagine what manner of homecoming feast awaits Mustafa.
What’s wrong with this
picture?
Peace or Violence?
Let’s be clear: Mustafa did
a very bad thing. It’s not right to rape your sister. It’s also not right to
kill somebody. But the wrongness of the ending of this novel goes beyond the
parameters of common sense.
In 1984, my husband and I visited
a Greek village on the Peloponnese called Kretena. On the ascending road to the
village, the word EIRENE and again, EIRENE kept appearing at intervals. EIRENE: the Greek word for Peace. The words were actually
stamped upon the road. Moments later, standing by a window in our hotel room, we
listened as the two women who ran the hotel told us, in Greek and broken
English, how the village had lost every last one of its men
in the Second World War. During the occupation, the Germans had come and had
rounded up every male age fifteen and older. All the men, and even boys of
fifteen, were shot and killed.
Genocide targets males in
this way.
Beyond Retribution
The Bastard of Istanbul is a novel about two families: one diminished by genocide,
the other cursed by an unexplained attrition of males. So what, in this world
of unaccountable loss, does the Kazanci clan do? They kill off the one
remaining man in the family! Given the context of genocide and male loss of
life, could an ending be more perverse?
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy
feminist retribution as much as the next woman. It’s always pleasant to see the
oppressor get his comeuppance.
But genocide is a very bad
business, outranking the sins of the patriarchy in wickedness to a significant
degree. It is wise to keep all manner of evil in perspective.
That is why I’m squeamish,
and even somewhat sickened, by the ending of The Bastard of Istanbul.
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