A review by naddie_reads
The Gaze by Elif Shafak

3.0

 

"This is a world of spectacles, About seeing and being seen."

This was... bewildering and perplexing, to say the least. The main story is focused on the relationship between an overweight woman and a dwarf; tired of being gazed at one day, they took matters into their own hands in order to turn the table on the gazers. But it's also a story about the bizarre and the odd -- of people who are different, of how our gaze can smolder and burn others. Also, there's some bit about a "dictionary of gaze", which was an interesting compilation in and of itself.

The stories are not interlinked with one another, though they talk about the effects of "The Gaze", which can come in many forms. Shafak also plays around with the timeline in this book in an experimentative way, and this book embodies the 'time is not linear' concept she proposes in the narrative. For that reason, there does seem to be a bit of a dissonance between the different storylines. 

Tonally, "The Gaze" feels different than the rest of Shafak's works, which may have something to do with the fact that it's originally written in Turkish and then translated by another. The constant repetition in the narration of the non-linear stories -- a narrative device that I suspect would sound more poetic when rendered in its original language -- would only make sense later, once the reader understands the connection between the repetitive storylines.

I personally had a hard time liking this in a sense, even if I understood what Shafak was getting at. In conclusion, this is definitely not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend this as a stepping stone if you're only starting out with Shafak's works.