Recommended Reading

A friend recommended a novel to me recently, The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.  I looked through her copy briefly and was skeptical about the story on two counts.  It starts out looking like a coming-of-age chronicle about a London teenager, and the main narrator is a fig tree!

I looked up the book on Amazon and the synopsis there showed that there was more to the story and that it dealt mostly with Cyprus and its turbulent history.  That was a topic of interest to me,  and it reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's book, Bitter Lemons, which I had enjoyed many years ago. So I bought the Kindle version and was glad in the end that I did.

Shafak skillfully ties together complex themes of history, ethnic antagonisms, personality development and ecology.  Her conscription of a tree as narrator, while seemingly improbable, turned out to be an inspired choice which made me rethink my own ideas about literary style.  

The omniscient narrator that carries the story in most novels really has no more grounding in reality than Shafak's fig tree.  The author actually does make use of the third person point of view to carry much of the plot's action, while the consciousness of the tree provides perspective as well as a surprising but satisfying ending to the story.  While I think the technique of jumping back and forth in time is much over-used to maintain suspense, Shafak uses it very effectively to explain the development of personalities and relationships.

Shafak's Amazon author's page shows some impressive academic credentials which give weight to the research acknowledgements in the book's endnotes, and she clearly drew on her own personal history of emigration in crafting the plot and characters of The Island of Missing Trees.

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Update:

Take twenty minutes to watch a TED Talk by Shafak.  It will explain a lot about her writing purposes and style.  She is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and impressively articulate. She writes in both Turkish and English.