The Saint of Incipient Insanities: A Novel - Hardcover

Shafak, Elif

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374253579 ISBN 13: 9780374253578

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

The Saint of Incipient Insanities is the comic and heartbreaking story of a group of twenty-something friends, and their never-ending quest for fulfillment.

Omer, Abed and Piyu are roommates, foreigners all recently arrived in the United States. Omer, from Istanbul, is a Ph.D. student in political science who adapts quickly to his new home, and falls in love with the bisexual, suicidal, intellectual chocolate maker Gail. Gail is American yet feels utterly displaced in her homeland and moves from one obsession to another in an effort to find solid ground. Abed pursues a degree in biotechnology, worries about Omer's unruly ways, his mother's unexpected visit, and stereotypes of Arabs in America; he struggles to maintain a connection with his girlfriend back home in Morocco. Piyu is a Spaniard, who is studying to be a dentist in spite of his fear of sharp objects, and is baffled by the many relatives of his Mexican-American girlfriend, Algre, and in many ways by Algre herself.

Keenly insightful and sharply humorous, The Saint of Incipient Insanities is a vibrant exploration of love, friendship, culture, nationality, exile and belonging.
Elif Shafax is of Turkish descent, and a prizewinning novelist. She was born in France and spent her childhood in Spain. The Saint of Incipient Insanities marks her American debut and is the first of her books to be written in English. She teaches women's studies at the University of Michigan.
The Saint of Incipient Insanities is the heartbreaking story of a group of friends and their never-ending quest for happiness and fulfillment. Ömer, Abed, and Piyu are roommates, foreigners all recently arrived in the United States. Ömer is a Ph.D. student in political science from Istanbul who adapts quickly to his new home and falls in love with the bisexual, intellectual chocolate maker Gail. Gail is American yet feels utterly displaced in her homeland; she moves from one obsession to another in an effort to find solid ground. Abed pursues a degree in biotechnology and worries about Ömer's unruly ways, his mother's unexpected visit, and stereotypes of Arabs in America as he struggles to maintain a connection with his girlfriend back home in Morocco. Piyu is Spanish, studying to be a dentist in spite of his fear of sharp objects, and is baffled by the many relatives of his anorexic Mexican-American girlfriend, Alegre—and in many ways by Alegre herself.

As time passes, their relationships with one another change and challenge these mismatched friends' preconceptions of themselves, their countries, and their adopted homeland. A vibrant exploration of love, friendship, culture, nationality, exile, and belonging, The Saint of Incipient Insanities introduces us to a wonderful new voice in international fiction.
"Exuberant."—Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post Book World

"This is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of a novel—a breathless and vivid journey into the lives of a motley assortment of brilliant, obsessive, and often troubled young immigrants, and an American whom one of them marries. With its themes of displacement, its Boston-area setting, and its ease with academic topics, Shafak's novel suggests Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake with the amplifier cranked up all the way to eleven. A work replete with dazzling wordplay, an infatuation with pop culture, and a fearless intellect, The Saint of Incipient Insanities marks Elif Shafak as a compellingly original voice in twenty-first-century fiction."—Adam Langer, author of Crossing California

"Shafax offers us an indelibly haunting portrait of contemporary America, in all its sexual/ethno/religious contortions. Goofy, sad, wise, and heartbreakingly funny, her novel is a bittersweet delight to read."—Fernanda Eberstadt, author of The Furies

About this title

About the Author:

Elif Shafak is the author of five previous books. The Saint of Incipient Insanities is the first of her novels to be written in English. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

From The Washington Post:

Elif Shafak was born in France and raised in Spain, has published four novels in Turkish and now teaches at the University of Michigan. She may be intimate with the disorientation of the expatriate, but she does not restrict herself to a literal definition of border-crossing. As the characters in her exuberant, uneven first novel in English make clear, feeling like an alien has little to do with visa status.

A shabby, rambling house in a Boston suburb is home to three graduate students in three different fields from three different continents with three different religious orientations. They share -- well, not much, actually, but somehow each has found a home with the other two. Abed is a Moroccan biochemist, a Muslim teetotaler fond of argument and haunted by a jinn that stalks his nightmares. Piyu, a devout Catholic from Spain, is at dental school despite his morbid fear of sharp objects. And Omer, newly arrived from Istanbul to study political science, denies all gods except three: alcohol, marijuana and coffee.

Opposite these foreign men are three American women who are, if anything, even less at home in the world. Alegre, Piyu's Chicana girlfriend, cooks copiously for the roommates as well as her own tribe of aunts while hiding her bulimia from all of them. Gail is a bipolar, suicidal, fiercely doctrinaire chocolate maker who unexpectedly and rather inexplicably marries Omer. Gail's jilted partner, Debra Ellen Thompson (never just Debra, please), rescued Gail from paralyzed anonymity at Mt. Holyoke, fell in love with her, and is now in powerless thrall to the woman she once empowered.

With characters this extravagantly eccentric, there isn't much room for plot. What we get instead is a series of wacky, occasionally brilliant, infuriatingly overstuffed soliloquies, as the perspective shifts from one character to the next. These are interspersed with group scenes in which two or more players offer their opinions -- often at high volume -- without actually offending anyone. Defiantly unstereotypical though they may be, the characters are still rigidly consistent in their contrasts. Having endowed her creations with so many quirks and hidden wounds, Shafak stops short of giving them life.

The true center of Shafak's novel is language itself. Words fill every inch of the frame, cavorting, crowding, parading, nesting within each other and leering from corners like the teeming figures in a Bosch painting -- words that can unlock the secrets of a culture or, just as easily, obscure them further. In Shafak's hands, the words are often more tangible than the ideas they are trying to transmit. Omer is "in every single layer down to the lowest echelons of his soul, demoralized and unsettled, poo-scared and exhausted into slow motion by the hyperspeed of that crepuscular hologram called 'time.' " Shafak delights in clever parallelisms: Describing the solidarity of expats, she notes that "they detached from their own flocks to migrate to faraway lands, and once there, they flocked into detachments." Acutely aware that language is the key to their happiness in America, the roommates invent a game to enlarge their vocabularies; their resulting sesquipedalianism -- "a long word to define the lust for long words" -- seems to have affected their creator as well.

Shafak loads her narrative with an exhaustive multiplicity of detail, a refusal (or an inability) to filter details that echoes the bewilderment of the stranger in a strange land. Thus, at the moment that Omer opens his eyes on his first morning in his new home, "a UPS van loaded with letters and boxes, a hacker on his way to break into the computer of one of his professors who he heard had accused him of being a 'hacker,' a Norwegian tourist lost on his way to the Museum of Modern Art, and a pizza delivery boy who had just received two phone calls from people unknown to him . . . plowed through Pearl Street." Sometimes exhaustive is just exhausting.

But there are serendipitous gems to be found in Shafak's prose. She understands the ancient fear that loving a foreigner can provoke, the sense that "even if the couple managed to get along flawlessly, when they tumbled deep down into their own slumber each night, their gods would start fighting till dawn." She has a sharp eye for American absurdity, like the tendency to give florid names to shades of paint -- a puddle of Alegre's vomit, Shafak points out, matches the chip of pink called It's a Girl! Her message, shorn of linguistic flourishes, is simple and deeply humanist. Life in the borderless modern world can bring all but the strongest to the brink of incipient insanity. In the end, Shafak asks, "Who is the real stranger -- the one who lives in a foreign land and knows he belongs elsewhere or the one who lives the life of a foreigner in her native land and has no place else to belong?"

Reviewed by Janice P. Nimura
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374253579
• ISBN 13: 9780374253578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368