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The National
August 14, 2011 Sunday
Interview with author Elif Shafak
As The Forty Rules of Love goes to paperback, the author talks about
the power of fiction.
Elif Shafak is explaining the genesis of her latest novel, The Forty
Rules of Love. As with so much that can be said about her literary
career - now encompassing 10 books, and vast success in her native
Turkey - the story winds its way back to one of her favourite topics,
the poet Rumi.
"With The Forty Rules of Love, I wanted to write a love story," says
Shafak. "But I wanted a love story with a spiritual dimension.
"For me, that took me to Rumi. And from Rumi, I went to Shams of
Tabriz. That's how the story took shape."
Shams was the 13th-century Persian Sufi scholar now remembered for the
transformative role he played in Rumi's life. Forty Rules delves into
his encounter with Rumi in the Anatolian city of Konya in 1244, the
deep, transcendental friendship that ensued and the lasting effect on
Rumi, who was inspired by the wisdom of Shams - and eventual
separation from him - to write his masterpiece, The Masnavi. All this
comes, though, via another narrative: that of Ella, a contemporary,
dissatisfied housewife in New England who takes a part-time job as a
reader for a small publishing company. The first manuscript that Ella
is given tells the story - which we read along with her - of Shams and
Rumi, and soon she finds herself engaged in a heartfelt email
correspondence with the author. The novel progresses via short
chapters that jump between the 21st and 13th centuries.
Upon hardback publication last year, Forty Rules catapulted the
39-year-old Shafak to international recognition and 550,000 copies
sold. Now Shafak is easily the best-known contemporary Turkish
novelist, after the all-conquering Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. She
seems tireless: a columnist for Turkish newspapers, including Zaman,
she contributes to The Economist and The New York Times, speaks
regularly at conferences and literary festivals, and has published 10
books in 12 years.
"I respect people who say that they write because they have a personal
story to share with the world," says Shafak. "But that was never my
starting point: I'm not interested in my own story, I'm interested in
not being myself. When writing a novel I can be anyone, I can go to
any place, any time: that is mesmerising to me."
Shafak's fiction has always been informed by weighty concerns, but
that hasn't prevented long-standing mainstream success in Turkey, now
spreading - via Forty Rules - to Europe and the US. Still, her
literary career has not been one of unimpeded ascent. In 2006 in
Turkey, she was charged with "insulting Turkishness" under article 301
of the Turkish Penal Code, when a character in her 2006 novel The
Bastard of Istanbul referred to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians in 1915 as a "genocide". A panel of judges quickly acquitted
Shafak; she would have faced a jail sentence of up to three years if
found guilty.
"Turkey is such a complex country; it defies generalisations," she
said. "But I can say that our society today is so young and
future-orientated and open to change. There is an on-going debate
about Turkish identities, and the nature of our civil society."
As you'd expect, though, Shafak resists the idea - often foisted on
her - that her work is representative of Turkey in any straightforward
way.
"There is this pressure to somehow be a spokesperson, to be
representative. I feel it constantly," says Shafak. "It's particularly
acute if you are from a non-western country, and you're a woman. Some
critics in the West expect that if you're a woman from a Muslim
country, then you should write stories about Muslim women; of course,
by that they mean some kinds of stories, about some kinds of Muslim
women. It bothers me that we have come to ascribe this function to
fiction, so that we want to be able to say it is representative of a
certain group of people. That is the opposite of what fiction is
about, which is the transcending of identity in that limited way. It's
about feeling, not identity."
Given the current state of the book industry, that is an apposite
position. Over the past two decades, literary fiction in the UK and US
has been dominated by fashionable "multicultural writing" that
pretends to help us understand other cultures, but that at its worst
only helps to reinforce old preconceptions. When people say, for
example, that Turkey is the "gateway between East and West", isn't
there usually implied in that an entire, essentially inaccurate
conception of what is "Eastern"?
"Unfortunately, there are a lot of sweeping generalisations produced
on many sides," says Shafak. "There is a cliched view in the West that
Muslim societies are behind the times, static and unchanging, and that
Muslim and western societies are mutually incompatible. None of this
is true. Muslim societies are evolving constantly, just as are other
societies.
"Some people in the West wanted to say that people in the Middle East
had no democratic impulse, that they weren't ready for freedom and
human rights. Well, the Arab Spring has profoundly challenged all
those cliches."
But if bad fiction is so often part of the problem, Shafak says that
good fiction can be an important part of the answer. It's via fiction
that we can all, however briefly, transcend ourselves, and connect
with those who are different; just as Ella does in The Forty Rules of
Love.
"Stories can play such an important role. They can bring us into
contact with all sorts of people, both real and imagined. I want a
discourse that is inclusive, that is about bringing people of
different backgrounds together around shared values.
"If we're going to learn anything in this world, we're not going to
learn it from people who are exactly the same as us. We're going to
learn it from people who are different."
August 14, 2011 Sunday
Interview with author Elif Shafak
As The Forty Rules of Love goes to paperback, the author talks about
the power of fiction.
Elif Shafak is explaining the genesis of her latest novel, The Forty
Rules of Love. As with so much that can be said about her literary
career - now encompassing 10 books, and vast success in her native
Turkey - the story winds its way back to one of her favourite topics,
the poet Rumi.
"With The Forty Rules of Love, I wanted to write a love story," says
Shafak. "But I wanted a love story with a spiritual dimension.
"For me, that took me to Rumi. And from Rumi, I went to Shams of
Tabriz. That's how the story took shape."
Shams was the 13th-century Persian Sufi scholar now remembered for the
transformative role he played in Rumi's life. Forty Rules delves into
his encounter with Rumi in the Anatolian city of Konya in 1244, the
deep, transcendental friendship that ensued and the lasting effect on
Rumi, who was inspired by the wisdom of Shams - and eventual
separation from him - to write his masterpiece, The Masnavi. All this
comes, though, via another narrative: that of Ella, a contemporary,
dissatisfied housewife in New England who takes a part-time job as a
reader for a small publishing company. The first manuscript that Ella
is given tells the story - which we read along with her - of Shams and
Rumi, and soon she finds herself engaged in a heartfelt email
correspondence with the author. The novel progresses via short
chapters that jump between the 21st and 13th centuries.
Upon hardback publication last year, Forty Rules catapulted the
39-year-old Shafak to international recognition and 550,000 copies
sold. Now Shafak is easily the best-known contemporary Turkish
novelist, after the all-conquering Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. She
seems tireless: a columnist for Turkish newspapers, including Zaman,
she contributes to The Economist and The New York Times, speaks
regularly at conferences and literary festivals, and has published 10
books in 12 years.
"I respect people who say that they write because they have a personal
story to share with the world," says Shafak. "But that was never my
starting point: I'm not interested in my own story, I'm interested in
not being myself. When writing a novel I can be anyone, I can go to
any place, any time: that is mesmerising to me."
Shafak's fiction has always been informed by weighty concerns, but
that hasn't prevented long-standing mainstream success in Turkey, now
spreading - via Forty Rules - to Europe and the US. Still, her
literary career has not been one of unimpeded ascent. In 2006 in
Turkey, she was charged with "insulting Turkishness" under article 301
of the Turkish Penal Code, when a character in her 2006 novel The
Bastard of Istanbul referred to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians in 1915 as a "genocide". A panel of judges quickly acquitted
Shafak; she would have faced a jail sentence of up to three years if
found guilty.
"Turkey is such a complex country; it defies generalisations," she
said. "But I can say that our society today is so young and
future-orientated and open to change. There is an on-going debate
about Turkish identities, and the nature of our civil society."
As you'd expect, though, Shafak resists the idea - often foisted on
her - that her work is representative of Turkey in any straightforward
way.
"There is this pressure to somehow be a spokesperson, to be
representative. I feel it constantly," says Shafak. "It's particularly
acute if you are from a non-western country, and you're a woman. Some
critics in the West expect that if you're a woman from a Muslim
country, then you should write stories about Muslim women; of course,
by that they mean some kinds of stories, about some kinds of Muslim
women. It bothers me that we have come to ascribe this function to
fiction, so that we want to be able to say it is representative of a
certain group of people. That is the opposite of what fiction is
about, which is the transcending of identity in that limited way. It's
about feeling, not identity."
Given the current state of the book industry, that is an apposite
position. Over the past two decades, literary fiction in the UK and US
has been dominated by fashionable "multicultural writing" that
pretends to help us understand other cultures, but that at its worst
only helps to reinforce old preconceptions. When people say, for
example, that Turkey is the "gateway between East and West", isn't
there usually implied in that an entire, essentially inaccurate
conception of what is "Eastern"?
"Unfortunately, there are a lot of sweeping generalisations produced
on many sides," says Shafak. "There is a cliched view in the West that
Muslim societies are behind the times, static and unchanging, and that
Muslim and western societies are mutually incompatible. None of this
is true. Muslim societies are evolving constantly, just as are other
societies.
"Some people in the West wanted to say that people in the Middle East
had no democratic impulse, that they weren't ready for freedom and
human rights. Well, the Arab Spring has profoundly challenged all
those cliches."
But if bad fiction is so often part of the problem, Shafak says that
good fiction can be an important part of the answer. It's via fiction
that we can all, however briefly, transcend ourselves, and connect
with those who are different; just as Ella does in The Forty Rules of
Love.
"Stories can play such an important role. They can bring us into
contact with all sorts of people, both real and imagined. I want a
discourse that is inclusive, that is about bringing people of
different backgrounds together around shared values.
"If we're going to learn anything in this world, we're not going to
learn it from people who are exactly the same as us. We're going to
learn it from people who are different."