The Flea Palace is a marvelously rich novel that conveys the intensity, splendour and diversity of the great city of Istanbul through the microcosm of one apartment building, Bonbon Palace, and the lives of its inhabitants. Wonderfully translated from the Turkish by Müge Göçek, it manages to give a sense of the ways in which Turkey is so alien to Western European sensibilities, while also making that teeming chaos sound not unattractive.

Recounted to us by a nameless narrator, a university lecturer who resides in Bonbon Palace, we are introduced to: Cemal and Celal, identical twins with nothing in common; Hadji Hadji (so pious they named him twice), his daughter-in-law and grandchildren; ‘Hygiene’ Tijen, obsessed with cleanliness to the point of madness, and her daughter Su, ironically afflicted with lice; the aging Madam Auntie; death-obsessed Sidar and his badly behaved St Bernard, Gaba, who reside in the old storage room in the basement; the Blue Mistress, the kept woman of an olive oil merchant; and several others.

At the beginning of the book, we see Bonbon Palace through the eyes of an outsider, the wonderfully named Injustice Pureturk, a pest controller on his way there to do a job. We get to know a lot about Injustice, and the rambling exploration of his origins establishes the roundabout style for the book. We also hear about the origins of Bonbon Palace – built by a White Russian emigre with the ill-gotten gains of his post-Revolutionary exploits. Then we get to the meat of the book: introductions to, and explorations of the lives of, each of the inhabitants of Bonbon Palace.

The first half of the book proceeds at a fairly leisurely pace, spending quite a lot of time with each family; the connections between many of them are fairly tangential, but their lives are all affected by the building’s main problem: it has become a dumping ground for the garbage of the whole neighbourhood, and the stink is permeating the whole building, accompanied by an invasion of cockroaches.

Just as a I was reaching a point where I was starting to feel that, as wonderful and intriguing as these characters and their lives were, the plot was not much in evidence, Shafak kicks things up a gear. The switches between characters become much more frequent – often only a page or two per character – and the underlying theme of the garbage emerges as the cornerstone of the plot, triggered by the narrator’s drunken inspiration for a solution to the problem that exploits the superstitious nature of many of Istanbul’s inhabitants. It succeeds in binding in most, if not all, of the inhabitants of Bonbon Palace as essential parts of the story, the foundations for which have been laid more effectively than the reader may have realised during the first half of the book.

The Flea Palace is a wonderful book but it’s not a perfect book – there are a handful of characters, like the Firenaturedsons in Flat 4, and Metin Chetinceviz and HisWifeNadia in Flat 6, who we find out quite a lot about but who never really feel like they are part of the main story arc.

Overall, though, this is very clever, witty and well crafted novel. Elif Shafak’s love for Istanbul shines out from every page, and her talents for characterisation and descriptive writing, along with the diverse homespun philosophies of her characters, overpower any minor flaws this book may possess.

Bookmark to