The Flea Palace - Softcover

Shafak, Elif

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714531014 ISBN 13: 9780714531014

Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

Set within a once-stately apartment block in Istanbul, The Flea Palace tells the story of Bonbon Palace, built by a Russian emigre for his wife at the end of the Tsarist reign, now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested and home to ten very different individuals and their families.
Shafak uses the narrative structure of A Thousand and One Nights to construct a story-within-a-story, as the mystery of the apartment's stolen garbage is considered from a variety of perspectives. There is the narrator, a womanizing, raki-swilling academic with a penchant for Kierkegaard; Hygiene Tijen, the 'clean freak', and her lice-ridden daughter Su; madly flamboyant Ethel, a lapsed Jew in search of true love, and the charmingly naive Blue Mistress whose personal secret is just one of many hidden within the confines of the building. Add to this a strange, intensifying stench, the cause of which is revealed at the end of the book, and we have a metaphoric conduit for the cultural and spiritual decay at the heart of Istanbul.

About this title

Review

Shafak can switch from a picareque tale of a father and son's broken noses to astute observations of how strangely depair and love manifest themselves without pausing. --The Guardian

A cast of wacky flat-dwellers lends it punch and pizazz --The Independent

Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist' --The Economist

From the Back Cover

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the garbage at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

'Picaresque' The Guardian

'Hyper-active and hilarious' Independent

Translated from the Turkish by Muge Gocek

Edition details

• Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0714531014
• ISBN 13: 9780714531014
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 444