Excerpt: “If only she could tell her that the beauties would only attract the worst guys. If only she could make her understand how lucky she was not to be born too beautiful; that in fact both men and women would be more benevolent to her, and that her life would be better off, yes, much better off without the exquisiteness she now so craved.”Such a decent way to explain that beauty can also be a venom that knowingly or unknowingly every girl wants to take. The elegance and simplicity with whic...

Entertaining? Yes. Lively characters? Absolutely. Page turner? By all means. It is what I call the perfect book for holiday. One might as well consider Middlesex and The Kite Runner, not only for the captivating stories but also for the multi-cultural (Turkish-American, Armenian-American, Greek-American, Afghan-American whatever-American) incursion into people's and countries' past and present political / economical / social situation.Beyond the complicated relationships (which got on my nerves

This is such a magical story and beautiful writing! I loved this book. In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong you...

I don't know why I didn't write a review for this book earlier. Goodreads tells me I've added it to my "absolute reading joy" shelf in 2014.It's one of the best novels I've ever read. It's a bit of a Turkish version of a Hundred Years of Solitude (female driven & less characters)All this years, and I can't forget Asya. I didn't forget the ending. It's such a rich, moving, unforgettable novel, that lives in a corner of my mind, aging with me. A masterpiece <3

I love Elif Safak and I liked this book. She makes her characters so alive when writing, good are not always good, bad are not always bad, there is beauty and poison in all of us at times. It is only a matter of how we use it.

The lines are beautiful.The humor is priceless.The questions are numerous.One example being: what is the value of truth?Is truth always to be sought, AT ALL COSTS?because: "the past is anything but bygone."and as Elif Shafak also so eloquently speaks: "Once there was. Once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin, for you could tell what you shouldn't remember and you could remember what you shouldn't tell."The humor - I adored the depiction of Fre...

The Bastard of Istanbul is a book with a lot of deep layers, not immediately visible when one starts reading the book. What one takes to be the story of two families - one Turkish, one Armenian, linked together in a convoluted way - in the best tradition of the "family drama" slowly metamorphoses into a tale full of the magic of the metaphor. While showing us the face of the modern Istanbul, a city of contradictions, it also pulls us deeply into its past; romantic and anguishing at the same time...

A florid hodgepodge of a book, The Bastard of Istanbul is too weak a novel to deal fruitfully with the issues it raises—the Armenian genocide of 1915; nationalism; how to navigate through your identity as the child of immigrants—and Shafak's ambition doesn't match her execution. It's cluttered and unfocused, and Shafak's characters fail to come alive beneath the weight of symbolism and stereotypes she heaps on them. The climactic revelations of the novel are also quite far-fetched and felt very

Wow! This was something! I have to admit I missed the feeling of oneness in a book. Right after I finnished it (& took a deep breath), I turned on my computer determined to read more about the author, the story, ideas, opinions. I like to do that when I don't want a book to end. Unfortunately, I got to an old conclussion of mine again: critique and dissection of the book has no charm. I clicked on some links and there I had! opinions about how characters evolve and how the novel is built, even c...

Full of suspense, wittiness and cleverly written. The Bastard of Istanbul is a story of two girls Asya and Armanoush (Amy) who are connected with one another in terms of their family linkage yet are very distinctive as characters. Asya is born out of wedlock to Zeliha (a tattoo artist) hence called as the bastard, whereas Amy was born in America to an Armenian father and an American mother, Rose. However their marriage didn’t last much and they separated when Amy was a small kid. Amy curious to

We need more popular fiction that depicts other aspects of Muslim life than the narrative of women's oppression that has become all too familiar. Though this book is a useful addition to that category, it falls short; the writing and plotting frequently feel forced, and some of the characters seem like nothing so much as convenient vehicles to carry out plot points. If the writing were consistently strong, this could be more easily overlooked, but there were too many times when I felt like the a...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nrvtbDescription: Two families - one Turkish, the other Armenian-American - are bound by the same horrific past. One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a nineteen-year-old, unmarried woman walks into a doctor's surgery. "I need to have an abortion," she announces.Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. All the Kanzanci men die early, victims of a mysterious family curse, so this is a household of women. Among them are Asya's beaut...

While I take my hat off for the commendable intentions and courage of Shafak for writing this book, the literary merit of this work, as far as I can judge, is close to nil. Dull characters, repetitious quasi-jokes, jagged storylines, essay-like prose (where you can clearly see through her ideology) fill the pages of this book and make reading it close to torture. And no redemption really with the ending. No, quite the contrary: It makes things really worse. Things I didn't appreciate at all: - B...

Unimpressive. The author takes on an ambitious story and topic, but botches the execution (I actually thought it was a bad translation, before I realised it was just badly written) and hits you repeatedly over the head with the "moral" of the story, even spelling it out explicitly at the end. She's clearly read a lot of Rushdie and Kundera, but what is rendered magical in the hands of the masters is chunky and overdressed in the hands of Shafak. Why does every character and cafe have to have a q...