Customer Reviews

The Flea Palace

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shafak makes the inhabitants of Bonbon Palace, a rundown apartment building in present-day Istanbul, thoroughly entrancing. It takes a talented writer to get me interested in the daily lives and anxieties of a pair of twin male Turkish hairstylists, for example, and Shafak incredibly did just that.

Mind you, this isn't a summer-at-the-beach page-turner or the kind of mental chewing gum that most people read. The Flea Palace is an insightful, deep novel that is very accessible, yet doubtlessly full of thicker meaning for those familiar with Istanbul. This novel is undoubtedly about Istanbul-the city itself is a major character-but it masterfully transcends the purely local.

Shafak chose an interesting structure for The Flea Palace, beginning with a somewhat abstract narrative introduction about deception and truth. She then sets the premise of the novel's main action: garbage is piling up in the garden of the Bonbon Palace, and relentless hordes of bugs and a sour garbage smell are bedeviling its residents. This short introduction, though, is quickly left behind, as the narrative then turns to the prehistory of the current-day Bonbon Palace, beginning with the displacement of a cemetery and two vanished saints' graves for a construction project, and continuing with the story of its builder, a Russian émigré.

From there, the novel returns to the present day, and quickly immerses the reader in the lives of the inhabitants of Bonbon Palace's ten apartments; the rest of the novel essentially unfolds across ten different stories, each revolving around the inhabitant(s) of the apartments, though as the book goes on they begin to run together.

This is a great book on many levels, bringing characters to life and creating a powerful sense of place. It takes a great writer to spark the reader's interest in the lives of the denizens of an unexceptional apartment building in a distant city, but Shafak does just that.

Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace struck me as an appropriate reflection of the city it describes. Like Istanbul itself, the book is sewn together from various bits of history, assorted personas (some more memorable than others), and held together by remnants of the lives, of the agendas that people follow, mostly irregardless of one-another. Furthermore, the book, like the city, is generously imbued with both luxury and filth, fact and lies, modernity and tradition: a contradiction, and yet more mystical than unbelievable.

Perhaps the richest and most appreciable aspect of the novel is the depth of the characters, often introduced and explored concisely but extremely vividly. Each character embodies thoughts and fears of the kind amplified in rumors, each rests on the edge of the unbelievable, but is sufficiently grounded in honesty to demand the attention and affection of the reader. I particularly enjoyed the story of the two twin hairdressers, whose actions, more often than not, echoed one-another and whose personalities, though very different, seemed to be two parts of a single whole. Other characters include a full cross-section of Istanbul's population, diverse in age, background, and faith. Though utterly lacking a unified history, the characters of this novel are still tied to one-another by their connections to their residence of faded elegance.

The internal "narrator", who tells some parts of the story in a reflective and analytical first person, is an active character himself, directly connected to the action of the story. Despite his initial lack of interest in the majority of his neighbors, he non-the-less manages to report to the reader an amazing number of intimate details of their lives. The portions of the novel written in third person have the tone of a sort of "omniscient gossip". The setting is personified, as well. She is a once-graceful apartment building, created in the folly of a successful but regretful older man of Russian origin. Her constant accumulation of garbage, without and within, mirrors the obsessions and the anxieties of her inhabitants.

The novel itself reflects the collecting, central to the story. The author (or perhaps internal author-narrator) collects words and phrases, routinely including apparently un-edited lists of objects and details, all included regardless of their relative importance, perhaps impressive in their thoroughness alone.

The narrative style is unorthodox, jumpy, and unpredictable. Often chapters seem to be stories unto themselves, woven into the main current of the novel only by names. The majority of the storylines are never finished in a classical sense. Like friends who move away whose troubles are frozen in our minds at the moment we knew them, many of the characters are seemingly abandoned at the end of the book, their stories unresolved.

In some ways, the final chapters, which expose a narrator-author framing the story, excuse the unfinished and mildly out-landish nature of the end of the novel. All the same, I disliked this added layer of complexity to the story. The appreciation of a novel requires a suspension of disbelief. Further, the use of an internal narrator within a novel presents another layer of distance between the reader and the story. To read a book written by someone who employs an internal narrator in order to bring together gossip-y episodes of the lives of many people, this must be my limit. Reading such a novel that also interjects a further layer between the narrator and the author struck me as too much distance between the reader and the story. Once the story is unveiled to be impression of a narrator as formulated in the imaginings of the mind of an individual created by the author, the characters loose some of their vibrancy that once made them so intriguing. Though the inclusion of the final chapter allowed the introduction of new personas and a touch of additional commentary, this frame detracts from the honesty of the imagery of the majority of the story.

I found the first part of the story, the exploration of the building and its origins, haunting and fascinating. The middle segments, where most of the action takes place, are interesting, if seemingly unconnected. The third part of the novel, however, seemed to discredit the honesty of the earlier tales by over-enthusiastically embracing the "surprise ending" that has become all-too-cliché in modern media. Overall, the book was quite good, definitely recommendable and possibly worth a second visit. Despite the aforementioned disappointments, my overall impression was positive. The plot lines of The Flea Palace were adequately interesting and the characterizations and descriptions truly enchanting.

What happens if a once-stately and now dilapidated palace in one of Istanbul neighborhoods is encircled by garbage, pervaded by its stench, invaded by fleas, the families unable to get rid of it?
What if one of the residents starts collecting garbage?

The flea Place is a strange novel.
Unlike other books it has not a true plan and shows a very peculiar narrative structure.

Depending on the perspective, it can be the story of a once stately - now dilapidated and flea infested - palace built by a Russian émigré for his wife.
Or it can be the story of the mystery of the apartments' stolen garbage, a story full of sarcasm that ends in tragedy.
Or it can be the portrait of modern Turkish society in the many characters presented: the university professor, the hairdresser twins, the elderly Madam Auntie, the religious Mr. Hadji Hadji, the naïve Blue Mistress, the young student ... and so on.

It has been said that the writer uses the narrative structure of A thousand and One Nights. I'm not convinced... : the structure used is mainly focused on the palace and the writer shows us each flat, in a rather haphazard - at the beginning at least - way. Each flat has a kind of personal identity and the sum of the many identities creates a living painting of modern Turkish society.

As it can be read under different perspective, so also appraisal of the story can be - and is - different.

It can be a kind of expressionist social portrait: under this angle there is sometimes a flamboyant irony in a kind of almost Almodovar-ian style (specially in the description of the twins hairdressers, madam Auntie and Hygiene Tijen). In this rabelaisian portrait the garbage comes to be visually the past: the annoying smell, the fleas and cockroaches but also the new flats (present) built on the site of ancient cemeteries (past), the unending creative-destruction that takes nowhere.

It can be a nostalgic picture of Istanbul: the many communities at the beginning of the century (the white Russians, the Armenians, the Greek and the Jews), the traditional Turkish culture endangered by modernity and a longing for a lost equilibrium. This picture has an almost mythological dimension, that recalls - yes - A thousand and one Nights, but also Ohran Pamuk (to remain in Turkey) and the Maquez of A Hundred Years of Solitude.
There's a tendency to idealize, to escape the grey mark of reality and to erase the mark of time and everyday misery .

It can be also a series of - sometimes unconnected - people, each one in his peculiar identity... but this viewpoint is definitely reductive and not the most interesting.

I enjoyed the book and I believe it can be worthwhile to recommend to readers interested in good literature.
It is very interesting and instructive
None the less, sometimes it lacks balance.
The best part is undoubtedly the first, the one in which the story of the palace is presented.
The central part is sometimes a bit too prolix, especially in Flat number 7 where there's almost no action but a quasi-philosophical assessment of the situation.
The last part is more agile, more properly the story of Madam Auntie madness and also the chapters become shorter but often the irony is cheap and sometimes a bit too underlined to be really pleasant.

You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.

I have not enjoyed a novel this much in years. It was not the mystery of the novel but the beauty of the writing and the finely drawn, fascinating characters and atmosphere that kept me hooked. I was so sad to see it end!

If I could, I would take off a half a point for some errors in usage that the editors should have picked up ("raised" for "razed"), which distracted me from time to time.

First of all I have to indicate that I am Turkish, and I read the Turkish version of the book so I apologize to everyone who is looking for an objective view.
For me reading the Flea Palace "Bit Palas" was like a great gift that I didn't expect to get. There are not a lot of Turkish writers that uses Turkish that fluent and in harmony. I found myself amazed with her capability of using Turkish to the limit of perfection, giving each and every word their justice.
About the plot and the characters, Elif Safak at her best. She creates a whole apartment with different voices (one in first person point of view, the others third person point of view), and again her talent shows us that the story continues on flowing even though the shifts on those different characters get crazier as the plot thickens.
As I have indicated I cannot be objective about this book, come to think of I cannot be objective about any of her books. Looking forward to read `The Saint of Incipient Insanities", her first English novel.

I really wish I could read this book in the original language. The lines and large phrases of thought are incredibly broad stroked and give a wonderful third dimension to the flow of the book. But there is a problem - the language (and perhaps the author would chide me on the use of the word here) is often grammatical stilted. Can someone get this woman a better translator? A jewel of a thinker and a brilliant intellect.

Sharp and deep intelligence is the first thing I appreciated in this book (the first I read by E. S.).
Many characters bound to each other only by the common belonging to this dilapidated palace where they happen to live in: each of them observed with sharp intelligence and humor but yet with compassionate sense of human suffering. And this "horizontal" variety of Istanbulities is crossed by the "vertical" genealogy of the house with its memory of loss and its struggle to recollect the fragments of the past: fragments now perished in garbage and guarded only by the most unnoticeable personage. The hommage to individual destinies who's memory gets lost is since the beginning said in the story of the empty sepulchre of the saint and the erased cemetry.