Customer Reviews

The Gaze

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The English translation of this book is incredibly bad. Here is a very simple example:
In the original text it says:
... with 50 cannon salute ... (in Turkish: 50 pare top atisiyla)

And here is the translated version:
... with 50 tosses of the ball ....
(in Turkish "cannon" and "ball" are homophonic words. Unfortunately, not being aware of this fact, the translator made up a new sentence which does not even convey the meaning of the preceding sentences.)

The translated text contains lots of such errors. If you had read this wonderful book of Elif Safak, and had not liked it, be sure that it is just because of these awkward translation errors.

This is a wonderful book, probably the best one I have read of Elif Shafak. This is a very well written story with parallel stories in different time that interdigitate to make the whole message stronger. It deals with how other people sees us and the effects that seeing, being seen and not seen and not being seen have in our lives. Secrets that we all have and how they impact on our wish to be seen and be seen are also wonderfully depicted in this novel. If you wish to expore this excellent contemporary Turkish novelist, The Gaze is a good start.

This is probably the worst book that I ever had the misfortune of buying. After attempting to read it, I ended up throwing it in the garbage. The author seems to be telling several uncontacted stories at the same time. It is not until far into the book that she finally lets you know that the lover of the fat woman is a dwarf. Until then we only know this because we read the back of the book. The worst of all is the comparison of her writing to Orhan Pamuk's. That is a grave insult to him.