The Island of Missing Trees

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In the weeks after finishing this novel, I found myself referring to the tree narrator in the book on multiple occasions. How she spoke such truth! Some of the facts she shared seemed unbelievable, then I would read others that I knew to be true. So I counted everything she said as a reliable narrator. SHAFAK: I wanted an observer that lives longer than human beings, you know? Trees have this, you know, longevity. They were here before us, and they will most probably be here long after we humans have disappeared - but also to think more closely about issues like, what does it mean to be rooted, uprooted and rerooted? So if you're telling the story of immigrants, people have experienced displacement, either within the island or outside. Then to think this through roots and uprootedness was an important not only metaphor but an important emotional attachment for me.

Shafak holds a PhD in Political Science from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and has taught at universities in Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France in 2012. This was so true of both the novel itself (honestly pretty much all the books I most enjoy reading) as well as Ada’s learning her parents’ story within the novel. There are bits and pieces, circles within circles (similar to tree rings! like arboreal time), threads that are started and dropped. And so often starting a story can seem insurmountable. What about her decision to use a different language? ( The Saint of Incipient Insanities, which came out in 2004, was the first novel she wrote in English.) “I was constantly writing little pieces in English, but I kept them to myself. I had my voice in Turkish. But then there came a moment – I’d moved to America to be a professor – when I just took the plunge. It gave me such a sense of freedom. I still find it easier to express melancholy and longing in Turkish, but humour is definitely easier in English. We don’t have a word for irony in Turkish.” INSKEEP: Now, you can imagine a novelist would take an interest in this ritual of burial and unburial, of disappearance and rebirth. And it became part of her newest novel, "The Island Of Missing Trees." The story reflects on a divided nation on a divided island in the Mediterranean, Cyprus, where Greece and Turkey went to war in the 1970s. The main characters are a family who fled the violence to live in the U.K. Elif Shafak says it's a book she struggled to write.Cyprus is famous for its halloumi ( helim) cheese, which is popular in the UK, too. What is the significance of food in The Island of Missing Trees? But what does “dealing with trauma” mean? Much German post-war literature speaks of the deafening silence of the parent generation who had lived through the war, and about the conflicts between the generations that resulted from that silence. The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss * Good Houskeeping, best books to read this month *

August 16: Turkish forces advanced to Green Line; ceasefire established and Green Line extended and remains a United Nations buffer zone between Turkish Cypriots to the north and Greek Cypriots to the south. Terms Perhaps the most fascinating and intriguing aspect of the novel is Elif Shafak’s treatment of the natural, which is infused with the magical. The story is replete with symbolic representations; needless to say, ‘tree’ is the primary symbol. Divided into six parts, each part of the novel is designated a title with reference to the tree: The first being “How to Bury a Tree,” the second is titled “Roots,” symbolizing cultural identity and traditional values; the third is “Trunk,” suggesting a connection; the fourth is “Branches,” representing wildness and freedom; the fifth part is titled“Ecosystem,” which is an amalgamation of Roots, Trunk, and Branches, also representing society. Acting as a perfect conclusion, the final part of the novel is titled “How to Unbury a Tree.” When Kostas and Defne carry with them a dead and decaying segment of the fig tree to England, the readers are made aware of the plight suffered by the immigrants and the displaced. They want to give the dead a proper burial, a sense of dignity and the families a sense of closure, a possibility for healing.” SHAFAK: How do you tell the story of a divided land without yourself falling into the trap of tribalism or without yourself falling into the trap of nationalism? As a storyteller, I could never find an angle, an opening, until I found the fig tree. So this might sound weird, but I feel grateful to the fig tree because it gave me a completely different perspective, and only then I was able to sit down and start writing the novel. How strange that in families scarred by wars, forced displacement and acts of brutality, it was the youngest who seemed to have the oldest memory” (p. 315). Can you think of situations where a traumatic experience in the past comes to the fore in the present?The former lovers reconnect, and Kostas persuades Defne to join him in London, to start again, to forget what has been. With them, they take a cutting of the old fig tree, which Kostas carefully tends and eventually plants in the garden of their north London home. Alongside the main narrative, the tree speaks, reflects, and offers wisdom about the realities of which humankind cannot bear too much. How do you tell your own stories? Does a story you share about your day over the dinner table or to a colleague during a break differ in style from a story you might tell on a long drive or a story you might write in your journal? Finding the Disappeared In The Island of Missing Trees, prizewinning author Elif Shafak brings us a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature, and, finally, renewal. Throughout the novel, the human world is dependent on nature to fulfill its history. This finally comes full circle at the end of the novel, when the human and the natural become one. At the very beginning of the story, the fig tree ponders whether it is ever possible for a human to fall romantically in love with a tree. Uncanny as it might sound, the question of a romantic affair between the fig tree and Kostas, the botanist, who is obsessed with the fig, is left hanging throughout the narrative. This is finally answered when the readers get to know that the spirit of Defne transmuted inside the fig after her death. When Meryem conducts a prayer service for the spirit of Defne to reach heaven, Defne chooses to remain “rooted.” Elif Shafak very interestingly spans her novel through an entire season, from the season of “burying a fig tree” to the “unburying of the fig tree,” and in this is reflected the story of a family—Kostas, Defne, and Ada—the story of burying and unburying the past, the story of burdening and unburdening, the story of letting go and holding on. Elif Shafak, born in France, is the author of nineteen books (twelve novels) translated into fifty-five languages. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the RSL Ondaatje Prize for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. The BBC included The Forty Rules of Love on “100 Novels that Shaped Our World.” I reviewed her novel Three Daughters of Eve for World Literature Today.

As the objectivity associated with narrative voice slips into the second person, indexical “us,” the novel expands anthropocentric literary forms to remind its reader that the literary imagination is not bound to the laws of logic but instead “makes possible the imagining of possibilities” (Ghosh 128). This is because the novel is “a medicine bundle,” in Ursula Le Guin’s evocative description, “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (169). Peter Boxall similarly emphasizes the form’s “unique ability to put the relationship between art and matter, between words and the world, into a kind of motion” ( Value, 13). The novel’s “prosthetic imagination” provides for a move between mind and matter, and a productive tension “between being like something and being that something itself” (Boxall, Prosthetic, 16). The Island of Missing Trees is a masterful work of storytelling. Elif Shafak does a beautiful job tying together the lives of her characters with the history and culture of Cyprus. It's a captivating story that ties together the topics of love, trauma, and resilience. While it can be heartbreaking at times, it also offers hope for an optimistic future.

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Merryn Glover is a novelist and radio dramatist. Her first significant work was a stage play, The Long Way Home, and since then she has written radio plays for Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. She was born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India, and Pakistan, where her Anglican Australian parents worked as Wycliffe Bible Translators. The author now lives in the Upper Spey Valley, in the Highlands, which provides the setting for Of Stone and Sky, her second novel. What a wonderful read! This book moved me to tears... in the best way. Powerful and poignant' Reese Witherspoon