The Bastard of Istanbul
Here is an entertaining quote from Elif Shafak's The Bastard of
Istanbul, a novel about a Turkish family and an Armenian family and
their intertwined pasts. Amanoush, the Armenian-American beauty with
no friends, meditates on the subversive power of novel-reading and
can't stop talking about books on dates. (Novels do seem to be
disapproved of by people who read only history, science or
biography--they're considered light-weight--and perhaps that's why so
few novels get reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. And perhaps
that's why Shafak includes a long chapter about Amanoush's reading ):
"Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more
dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the
cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to
surprises as a moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you
could be so carried away that you could lose touch with reality--that
stringent and solid truth from which no minority should ever veer too
far from in order not to end up unguarded when the winds shifted and
bad times arrived. It didn't help to be so naive to think things
wouldn't get bad, as they always did. Imagination was a dangerously
captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and
words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. If
as a child of survivors you still wanted to read and ruminate, you
should do so quietly, apprehensively, and introspectively, never
turning youself into a vociferous reader. 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. With a
fate and family like this, Armanoush had to learn to downplay her
talents and do her best not to glimmer too brightly...."
And later Amanoush tells her aunt:
"'You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at
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