Notes
Set within a once-stately apartment block in Istanbul, The Flea Palace tells the story of Bonbon Palace, built by Russian noble émigré Pavel Antipov for his wife Agripina at the end of the Tsarist reign. It is now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested, and home to ten very different individuals and their families. Elif Shafak gives us a bird’s-eye insight into each apartment, and we see their comic and tragic lives unfold.
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Elif Shafak is a young Turkish novelist with a prodigious output: she is only 33, and The Flea Palace is her fourth novel, with a fifth, written in English, due later this year. Her literary success and journalism mark her out as a figurehead of a new generation of writers, who use literature to reconfigure Turkish identity, and its relationship to the country's history.
Shafak was born in France and educated in Spain before returning to Turkey as a young adult. Thus she has a doubled, and marginalised, Turkish identity. Perhaps this helps enable her to cast a fresh eye on modern Turkey, and to celebrate the contradictions and incoherences that its past has bequeathed to the present. She is free from many of the modernist literary, and political, orthodoxies that are part of Kemal Ataturk's cultural legacy.
