Title: Honor
Author: Shafak, Elif
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 352
Date Read: 16 August 2022
Bookshelves: read, favorites
My Rating (out of 5): ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The best time to have written this review was five weeks ago when I completed the book amidst excitement and measured melancholy. Part of why I stalled was because I felt I did not possess the language for the range of emotions I experienced while reading. So I waited. But the longer I lazed around for these words to somehow find me, the more I found the core of the book slipping away from me. Worried that there would be nothing left to write about when the right words eventually came, I resolved to freeze all these scattered emotions in words before all was lost to time.
In this book, we are introduced to several generations of a Kurdish family; the simple lives they led, and the circumstances that brought some members to England– where their lives were forever altered by an honour killing. For anyone even remotely familiar with this barbaric cultural practice, this summary would read like a pedestrian story. But make no mistake; it was anything but! Due in part to the author’s ability to tell a story.
Honour was a joy to read but it must have been a difficult book to write. I say this because the book began by informing the readers of the killing; leaving little to the reader’s imagination. But this is where Shafak’s brilliance comes through. By design, the book straddles the past and the present, giving readers insights into the lives of the family members and how their actions shaped the behaviours of the coming generations. Shafak also told the story from the point of view of each major character, helping them to take centre stage in their own stories and aiding them to assume their own personalities over time. Because of this, I came to know some characters as “the writer”, “the misogynist” and “the maverick”. Further, she left plot twists in places that kept the reader thirsting for more [and in one particular case, yelling expletives]
Shafak is unparalleled in her ability to evoke emotions with her words. In this book, she shows how the preference for the boy child in certain cultures creates an environment of inequality between genders from cradle to grave. She illustrates how trauma, if left unchecked, can tarry across generations. She renders in detail the ridiculous double standards that pervade marital dynamics in certain cultures. She writes of forbidden love, sibling sacrifice, juvenile delinquency, and personal redemption. The many instances of injustice in this book will rile you up and will have you wondering why some aspects of culture have been allowed to persist to this day.
It goes without saying that Elif Shafak is a gifted storyteller and a true master of language. At this point, I can admit without shame that Shafak has become my favourite author alive.
Honour takes all my five stars, and more.