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Bit palas Elif Shafak publisher: Metis Yayinlari, Istanbul, 2002 translated as: The Flea Palace publisher: Querido, Amsterdam, 2004 translation: Müge Göçek refered to by: Snow Orhan Pamuk
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The setting is a stately residence in Istanbul built by Russian noble émigré Pavel Antipov for his wife Agripina at the end of the Tsarist reign, now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested, and home to ten families. Shafak uses the narrative structure of A Thousand Nights and One Nights to construct a story-within-a-story | narrative. Inhabitants include Ethel, a lapsed Jew in search of true love and the sad and beautiful Blue Mistress whose personal secret provides the novel with an unforgettable denouement. Add to this a strange, intensifying stench whose cause is revealed at the end of the book, and we have a metaphor for the cultural and spiritual decay in the heart of Istanbul. |
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| BOOKS BY ELIF SHAFAK: The Gaze 2000 –› Excerpt Shafak explores the subject of body image and desirability in women and men. | ||
| The Flea Palace 2002 A stately residence in Istanbul, now home to ten families, is a metaphoric conduit for the cultural and spiritual decay in the heart of the city. | ||
| The Saint of Incipient Insanities 2004 Three graduate school roommates - a Moroccan, a Turk and a Spaniard - are strange bedfellows in a potentially inhospitable land in this first novel in English by Turkish writer Elif Shafak. | ||
| The Bastard of Istanbul The tale of two families, an exiled Armenian family living in San Francisco and the Kazancis of Istanbul, whose contemporary stories conjoin through a family secret that began with the 1915 massacre of Armenians. | ||
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