The Island of Missing Trees

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The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss * Good Housekeeping, 'this month's 10 books to read right now' (September) * Where The Overstory gestures towards tree writing, with Berthold Schoene noting the novel’s incorporation of arboreal voices in cursive at the head of each chapter, signalling a new mode he calls “arborealism” (15), The Island of Missing Trees goes further to unmute the tree within literary fiction. At a narratological level, Shafak gives equal standing to the novel’s third person narrative voice and its arboreal one. The fig tree is a character too that comments on other characters and tells her own story: 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. But remembered it is, and not just on the island itself and among the people who live there now, but also among the many Cypriots who left their homes and settled elsewhere, in the hope of starting again. Identifying dead from conflict around the world is happening every day. As Shafak shares in her interview with Steve Inskeep, the reason that Cypriots are working to find the bones of people who went missing during the ethnic violence is that

The other sub-narrative is about Ada, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Kostas and Defne. Ada is introduced to the readers through an incident that happened at her school. During her history lesson, when asked about heritage and culture, something seemed to have snapped inside Ada, and she could not help but scream her lungs out—it was almost like an involuntary action, something beyond her control. Why did she react in such a manner? What was the usually quiet teenager so frustrated about? What had triggered her? These are some of the questions the readers find answers to as the narrative gradually progresses. Ada means “island” (referring to her origin), and therein lies the biggest irony of her life. Born and brought up in England, Ada had been kept away from her culture and heredity all her life—a deliberate decision on the part of Defne. Defne did not want her daughter to suffer the same predicament as hers; she wanted to shield her daughter from the trauma and anxiety she herself had suffered as a victim of the Civil War and the atrocities she had faced at the hands of social prejudice and orthodoxy. Yet Ada turns out to be a case of intergenerational trauma. The more her parents keep her away from her “roots,” the more she is obsessed with the secret. Some of Ada’s questions are cryptically answered by her maternal aunt Meryem, with whom she is reluctant to bond at first but gradually warms up. However, till the end, we see Ada fail to completely forgive her mother, and she holds Defne responsible for her own death. It makes the readers wonder: could Ada have had a better understanding of her mother’s trauma and depression had she been aware of her lineage and history? Is it even possible to sever all ties with our roots? Can secrecy ever act as a protective shield? The Island of Missing Trees, for all its uses of enchantment, is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately * FT *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. Arboreal-time is equivalent to story-time – and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes […]. Her botanical reading, as her bibliography reveals, was extensive (Richard Mabey, Merlin Sheldrake, an academic article about the notion of “optimism” and “pessimism” in plants). In the novel, Kostas at one point buries his fig, the better to protect it from the British winter. “I’d heard that they could be buried,” says Shafak. “When I lived in Ann Arbor in Michigan, where it can be quite cold, I heard of Italian and Portuguese families doing this. I found out that it really works. You hide it safely beneath the ground for two months, and then, when the spring comes, you unbury it, and it’s a kind of miracle, because it’s alive.” Later, this unburying is mirrored by other, grimmer exhumations: those carried out by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, a bicommunal organisation that continues to try to find and identify the bodies of the civil war’s disappeared.

The New York Times has archived its articles online. Reporter's Notebook: Politeness and Violence Mix in Cyprus, from the July 30, 1974 issue, shares a perspective of the destruction of the war in July of 1974. This is the time period when Kostas is sent to London, Denfe seeks an abortion and The Happy Fig is bombed. Intergenerational Trauma

Selected

A wonderful rebuke to anthropocentric storytelling . . . Elif's extraordinary new novel about grief, love and memory * Literary Review *

A brilliant novel -- one that rings with Shafak's characteristic compassion for the overlooked and the under-loved, for those whom history has exiled, excluded or separated. I know it will move many readers around the world, as it moved me' Robert Macfarlane Is she hopeful for the future of Cyprus? For all the pain in her book, Kostas’s enduring fig tree suggests that she might be. “I want to feel optimistic,” she says, softly. “The Committee on Missing Persons is so valuable. Many of those involved with it are women, and these young volunteers give me hope. But, of course, politicians are a different matter. That’s more complicated.” Right on cue, the two small children at the table next to us begin screaming like banshees. For others, it is the memory of military service, being stationed in the Mediterranean sun; remnants of a more recent colonial past which remain visible today.INSKEEP: Burial turns out to be a widespread practice. It's even been reported on NPR. People who take fig trees out of the Mediterranean work to preserve them in colder climates. A rich, magical new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.