Customer Reviews

The Saint of Incipient Insanities: A Novel

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this novel the author, Elif Shafak, writes a lovely multi-cultural, multi-character, multi-language ode to immigrants and to the American, and to the graduate school, experience. We meet her characters through their own private, and sometimes excruciating, nurosises. Bulemia, depression, neurotic behavior, alchoholism all feature in the novel, but help us see the human sides of her characters rather than define them.

The book follows six main characters as they live their lives in Boston and try to define themselves through their inherited and new cultural biases. Funny at times and heartbreaking at others, the novel is a psychological journal into foreign lands.

The most striking feature of the book is the use of language and for those who enjoy not just a good story, but the inventive use of rich and flowing language, this will be an enjoyable read.

If you like this book, read also, "My Mother and the Turk" a book with a similar tone about a third generation Armenian-American family's remembered, and forgotten, past.

Another great novel from Elif Shafak, "The Saint of Incipient Insanities" is, at its core, about identity. Like Shafak's other work, it's the little things that makes it work so well--countless small details about cultural quirks, cuisines, and customs that make the characters come alive.

For me, one high point came early in the book, when Shafak talks about the disorientation of seeing one's name stripped of diacrtics (sp?) and other pronunciation marks. It's a pretty obvious metaphor for the cultural homogenization that you'll find in a melting pot like the US, but it also says something on a deeper, more personal level.

It's more of a character study than a plot-driven page-turner, but you'll probably find yourself unable to put the book down, and, like the characters, caught somewhere between East and West.

The prose is often elegant, and always penetrating. I don't want to give away too many details and spoil the book, but I've got to stress how effective it is at presenting a range of complex, original characters trying to live in a difficult world.

It's another great work from Shafak, a talented writer in any language.

I think this is her best novel so far. I think this book includes some realities that most people would indefinitely feel obliged to accept.
the ending is superb, just right for the book itself.

I found this tale of modern love, eating disorders, angst, young adulthood and assimilation a good read with a rather dissapointing ending. It felt like at the end of the story it unravelled instead of resolved. (Intentional?)

The characters are wry and humorous, the plot interweaving, the details very telling... One of the best fiction books I've read in a long time.

Stiff unnatural English, hints of the camera eye of Robbe Grillet, boring treatises on diacritical marks standing in for the losses of the poor dear immigrant shades of Salman Rushdie without credit.

It reads like an intelligent high school student with a college level dictionary of English writing away.

Every line of tin dialogue is modified with a fancy descriptive verb standing in for "said."

How did this book get published in English? What language was it translated from? Who translated it like this?