On one side there are the happy, eccentric, doting Armenians, where everything has a double meaning and there is an underlying sorrow to almost everything they do. On the other side are the happy, eccentric Turks, where everything has a double meaning and there is an underlying sorrow to almost everything they do. Yet Elif doesn't leave her people stranded, and with the help of her two nineteen-year-old protagonists, Armanoush and Asya, we quickly move beyond the realm of superficial and cliched.
This not only makes it a far more interesting and entertaining book to read, it also takes a subject, genocide, which is next to impossible for most of us to understand, and personalizes it in such a way that we can understand why the Armenians feel the way they do. Why doesn't the Turkish government admit it happened? They can easily blame it on the autocratic Ottoman Empire that was overthrown in favour of a secular government in the early 1920s, yet to this day there is a steadfast refusal to acknowledge what the rest of the world knows took place; it's only in Turkey that the past is denied.
As long as one person remembers the past there will always be the danger the secret you've hidden, the secret you hide from, will come out in the open. The longer it remains hidden, the longer it takes to recover from and the worse the damage that is caused when it's revealed. Memory and pain are part of the same nervous system in the human body; it's how we are conditioned to know not to stick our hand in an open flame, the memory of the pain tells us not to do it again. If we are smart we learn our lesson and remember the pain; The Bastard Of Istanbul is about what happens when the pain is ignored and the wound of memory is allowed to fester until the damage is irreversible.
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