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Metis Fiction
Novel
13 x 19.5 cm, 216 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-285-7
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Prints:
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1st Print: August 2000
12th Print: August 2007
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Download high resolution copy 
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About the Author
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Elif Shafak is one of the leading novelists in Turkey. Born in 1971 in Strasbourg, she received her PhD in political science. Her first novel Pinhan (The Sufi, 1997) was awarded the Mevlâna Award in 1998. She then published Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City, 1999), Mahrem (The Gaze) which won the Turkish Writers' Association Best Novel of the Year Award in 2000, Bit Palas (Flea Palace, 2002) and The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004). Her essays on gender, identity, cultural fragmentation, language and literature were collected in a volume entitled Med-Cezir (Ebb and Flow, 2005). She is a columnist for two major Turkish papers and she contributes to various European and American papers, including Berliner Zeitung, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at University of Arizona, previously she taught at the University of Michigan. Her books have been translated into various languages, her most recent novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) was published by Viking Penguin in the US.
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Other Books from Metis
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Pinhan (Sufi), 1997
Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City), 1999
Bit Palas (The Flea Palace), 2002
Araf (The Saint of Incipient Insanities), 2004
Beşpeşe, 2004
Med-Cezir (Ebb and Tide), 2005
Baba ve Piç (The Bastard of Istanbul), 2006
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Elif Shafak
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The Gaze
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A Novel on Seeing and Being Seen
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Mahrem: Görmeye ve Görülmeye Dair Bir Roman
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Rights sold / published by:
Dutch: De Geus
English: Marion Boyars
Greek: Exandas
Literary agency: Marly Rusoff & Associates
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Reviews
Excerpt
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A novel about the interventionist gaze of the Muslim/Jalal God, of the society, as well as of the male lover. The novel traces the steps of the runaway female body that must search for its elusive autonomy while being encroached upon by the gazes of others. With an intricate plot and language, the novel travels from Siberia in 17th century to France in 19th century and the story finds its links back to the life of a bulimic woman, her childhood and a sexual abuse in 1980s Turkey, Istanbul. Going through multiple printings, The Gaze received the Turkish Writers’ Association Best Novel Award.
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TLS, 21 July 2006
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"Shafak’s original and compelling book has perception as its overarching theme. Like time itself, Shafak suggests, seeing and looking are circular, referential forms, with the constant movement of a glance returning again and again to its subject, unstoppable and penetrating."
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Publishers Weekly
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"Shafak's prose follows a humorous, idiosyncratic course, seizing on arresting visual details, such as 'a house the color of salted green almonds' and dispensing oddly charming aphorisms: 'Love is a corset.' (She adds: 'In order to understand the value of this you have to be exceedingly fat.') At one moment, a faceless newborn's features are etched on by an anxious aunt; at another, a shipwrecked Russian sailor surprises a shaman in flagrante delicto with an oversized sable. The early parts of the novel can feel maddeningly unfocused for a book about the power of the stare. Later pages home in on an unexpected emotional trauma, and the atmosphere of fantastical levity clears to reveal an urgent, human pain. Shafak probes the many ironies of appearance and perception with entertaining and affecting results."
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At this point I’d found a job teaching half days at one of the newly opened nursery schools. It didn’t pay much, but the conditions were good. What I had to do was sing with the children, paint with them, make up stories, and kneed colored clay with them from morning till noon. At one thirty we had our lunch break. Our cook prepared different meals each day according to the weekly plan given to him by the parents’ association. But it seemed to me as if we ate köfte and potatoes every day. Sometimes the köfte were made of meat, sometimes of chicken, sometimes of fish, sometimes of cracked wheat and sometimes of soy. The potatoes were always the same. And we always drank glass after glass of milk. The children snickered openly at the way I drank my milk. Every day we had a different kind of pudding that passed for desert. When lunch was over the little ones would take their afternoon nap. Then after I’d gone back and cleaned up my classroom, I’d turn my post over to someone else. The director of the nursery was always calling me in and telling me that the parents wanted me to work full-time. According to him the parents loved me. The parents wanted it to be me they saw when they came to pick up their children in the evening.
Anyway I wasn’t any better than any of the other teachers. I was just much much fatter. My appearance gave the parents confidence. While I was in charge, they were less worried about their children falling and hurting themselves, or being rough with each other, or playing with sharp instruments. Like an enormous balloon filled with dreams that had the taste and consistency of strawberry pudding, I softened all movement around me. When I was there, modeling knives were a little less sharp, the corners of the desks a little less pointed, the pushing and shoving less harsh, even the slides in the playground were less slippery. When I was around, the children were secure. Perhaps I was even cut out for this kind of work...
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