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A review by emason1121
The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak
3.0
3.5, for the individual stories, especially the Anitpov’s. They were both inventive and descriptive.
Each of the apartments in The Flea Palace could be a stand alone short story, without dividing them and adding them into a single book, even though they serve mainly as description and no central conflict of note is ever brought to a climax and resolved. And though I don’t care if books have no concise beginning and no particular end, without an arc around a specific conflict, this one dropped steeply off a cliff after building tension toward a particular centralized climax. Shafak would have done better to dispense with this central event altogether and just let each of the stories end where they may, with nothing to connect the stories but the physical connection of the apartment building. She did the richness of her description a disservice by building toward the climax, increasingly integrating the lives of her characters, and then ignoring most of them after that central event. Two further complaints are the premise she lays out in the epilogue felt rushed and awkwardly tacked on, and the garbage metaphor/allegory (if indeed it was that) was dense and inadequately connected. I feel like (though can’t think of any examples right now) I’ve seen books structured similarly that were executed better.
Though Flea Palace is by far my favorite of Shafak’s books, the bar is quite low. Expectations around her novels are high and— for me— she fails to meet them, mostly because her stories are rushed, take on too much, or, like Flea Palace, are resolved too quickly. These problems could be easily solved with some adequate editing, so I do wonder about the process of writing them and what I seem to missing that makes them so deserving of accolades once published.
Each of the apartments in The Flea Palace could be a stand alone short story, without dividing them and adding them into a single book, even though they serve mainly as description and no central conflict of note is ever brought to a climax and resolved. And though I don’t care if books have no concise beginning and no particular end, without an arc around a specific conflict, this one dropped steeply off a cliff after building tension toward a particular centralized climax. Shafak would have done better to dispense with this central event altogether and just let each of the stories end where they may, with nothing to connect the stories but the physical connection of the apartment building. She did the richness of her description a disservice by building toward the climax, increasingly integrating the lives of her characters, and then ignoring most of them after that central event. Two further complaints are the premise she lays out in the epilogue felt rushed and awkwardly tacked on, and the garbage metaphor/allegory (if indeed it was that) was dense and inadequately connected. I feel like (though can’t think of any examples right now) I’ve seen books structured similarly that were executed better.
Though Flea Palace is by far my favorite of Shafak’s books, the bar is quite low. Expectations around her novels are high and— for me— she fails to meet them, mostly because her stories are rushed, take on too much, or, like Flea Palace, are resolved too quickly. These problems could be easily solved with some adequate editing, so I do wonder about the process of writing them and what I seem to missing that makes them so deserving of accolades once published.