Name: Untitled Elif Shafak Novel
ISBN: 9780241434994

Elif Shafak

A new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

Untitled Elif Shafak Novel

Michelle Dsouza

Nobody told me the Fig Tree was a character. I went in expecting a love story set against the backdrop of Cyprus's 1974 division, and I got that, but I also got a century-old Ficus carica with opinions about bats, butterflies, human grief, and the particular way people avoid learning things about trees because they are afraid of what they might find out. That surprise alone tells you something about what Elif Shafak is doing here. The book moves across two timelines. In 1970s Cyprus, Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, fall in love inside a taverna where a fig tree grows through a cavity in the roof. The tree watches everything. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada is sixteen, recently bereaved, and struggling with a grief nobody around her will name directly. A fig tree grows in the garden of her family home. The two timelines fold into each other, and so do the losses. Shafak's structural choice to give the Fig Tree its own narrative voice is the book's biggest risk and its greatest success. For most of the book it operates as narrator: balanced, observant, unbiased, knowing things about the natural world that no human character could deliver without it feeling like a lecture. The information never feels like a lecture. You learn about fig wasp symbiosis, bat deaths in wartime, butterfly migration patterns, and fungal networks under the soil, and none of it feels grafted on. It feels like the world the story lives inside. The butterfly migration section is the one that stayed with me longest. Butterflies are always moving, always seeking change. Shafak places that against forced human migration and says nothing further. She doesn't need to. The reveal that Defne is the Fig Tree is the emotional hinge the whole book builds toward. Looking back, the narration doesn't change. The Fig Tree knew more about trees than Defne ever could have. But the love in those observations, the way it watches Kostas and Ada, the way it grieves without naming grief, that lands differently once you know. Shafak earns it. Kostas works precisely because he is readable throughout. His love, his values, his steadiness never shift. He is a man who loves with his whole self and carries loss the same way. His loneliness after Defne mirrors Chico the parrot's in a way the book makes quietly explicit, two beings kept company by a tree when the person they needed most was gone. Meryem, Defne's aunt, arrives from Cyprus and immediately becomes the book's warmth and its wit. Her proverbs, her superstitions, her absolute certainty about everything she believes, and the way her certainty softens the story's grief without dismissing it. She is the reason the book doesn't collapse under its own weight. Ada's arc is the one place the book leaves a thread slightly loose. The classroom incident points toward something the narrative doesn't fully resolve. I've decided that's intentional. Sometimes grief gets so large you scream in public and no tidy resolution follows. The book trusts the reader to sit with that. The writing shifts register between the human chapters and the Fig Tree's narration, and that shift works harder than it sounds. It physically resets your pace. Shafak handles the political history of Cyprus with the care it deserves. She doesn't treat the 1974 division as backdrop. She puts two teenagers in love across a fault line that their families and their governments drew, and she asks you to understand what it costs them. "You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them." That's the whole book in four sentences. I teared up at the end. Defne being the Fig Tree, watching over Ada and Kostas, staying behind in the only form she could. My heart hurt and was full at the same time. I didn't expect a book about trees to do that to me.

safs

4 stars

This story is set across London and Cyprus across different time points within a period of fourty-something years. Partly narrated by a fig tree, it details a forbidden love story that brews amidst the Cyprus troubles, and a grieving daughter who seeks to fill in the blanks of her family’s story. 

There is no denying that Shafak’s writing style is wonderful. The prose is lyrical, her descriptions are incredibly vivid and the juxtaposition of violence and trauma against tenderness makes for an enthralling read. I liked the fig tree as a narrator, but I found her perspective to be repetitive as the book progressed, and which past a certain point, added little to the plot. The bigger weakness however, is that Shafak attempts to cover too many themes, resulting in some that are underdeveloped and a few characters that fall flat.

Hyshe Thaufeeg

Bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them

Bilge Ince

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is that exactly an end?


A story inside many stories about islanders where we divide them as Greek and Turkish and also about plants and animals that we have been refusing to care. I loved the whole book except the part where Defne and Kostas get together for the second time. The mood swing confused me. But the part I especially loved was when Shafak mentioned plants and animals as living creatures whose lives are worth as much as us humans. 

… it would take me seven years to be able to yield fruit again. Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown source, you don’t simply carry on as before; A part of you die inside so that another part can start all over again.

You know myths and fairytales a woman who breaks social conventions is always punished and usually the punishment is psychological, mental.

charisa

4.5 rounded up! 

i really liked this one. it was delicate and compassionate, weaving together cyprus’ sensitive history with a touch of magical realism. also, i thought the chapters from the perspective of the fig tree were especially imaginative, if just a tad metaphorically heavy-handed.

shafak also handles the immigrant story with a lot of thought and care, wrestling through issues of generational trauma and ethnic conflict. the ending from ada’s pov felt a bit too clean, but i can appreciate the overall message! 

lastly, shafak is a wondrously lyrical writer, which feels like a stark but not unwelcome departure from all the japanese lit i’ve been consuming lol 

— 

“Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.”

Faith Ho 

i’ve read enough novels by elif shafak by now to recognise signatures of her style that seep into each book — and after all, that’s why i religiously pursue them. traces of that you can see in this story: sentences pulsating with life, stories of families and the inherited traumas and identities that while painting a smaller picture (one family) really tell the story of the whole (the nation and the cultures), the magical feeling (no magic is involved, yet it feels that there is magic - the magic of life, perhaps, as cliche as that is). 

this book was no different. it was mesmerising, and an utter joy to get lost in, though undoubtedly melancholic at (many) parts. starting with the life of ada as a teenager in britain (only part where unfortunately i feel the prose falters a little at trying to capture the interaction of teens, but small matter), it talks about her family’s past in cyprus, and the story of her parents (somewhat romeo and juliet reminiscent). interesting was the alternate chapters in the fig tree’s perspective, providing that sense of magical allure, and wonder at the natural world. 

the quote i have here is from the afterword, but i think it hints at her writing pretty well: “everything here is fiction — a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination.”

jini

Spencer McWilliams

Such beautiful writing! I was in awe of how Shafak wrote a fig tree’s perspective and made it feel so real. There were moments where I felt that the story dragged on a bit, but overall it was an enjoyable read. A sad, but beautiful love story that intertwines nature and humanity.

Claudia Scully

This is a gorgeous book from beginning to end. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially those who care for nature, trees, and believe in true love despite everything.

Rina

The way this story was told was unique and very imaginative. I don't know about the civil war in Cyprus and here we see it through the "eyes" of a fig tree. I know it sounds boring, and it may be for some, but I enjoyed those chapters. The prose was smooth, only downside is that sometimes it may sound like a lecture. The storytelling was excellent, what I didn't like with the narration was how it would hint at what was going to happen, so there wasn't anything surprising with this book. Plot-wise, this book was slow. I found myself wondering where things were going even when I was halfway through. The characters were well-written and distinct, not very memorable though. Despite the many things I did enjoy, I felt something lacking here. Can't exactly pinpoint what.