Neil Gordon
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A Turk in Progress
That the rich literary culture of contemporary Turkey is largely known to an American audience through Orhan Pamuk means it is largely unknown: Like many Nobel laureates, Pamuk can be as tedious as he is impressive, and few readers, I strongly suspect, actually finish his highly cerebral books. That makes it all the more welcome that Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, her sixth and the second she has written in English, may well break Pamuk’s monopoly on the American imagination. If it does, it will largely be thanks to the advance publicity it received recently when Shafak––