The Saint of Incipient Insanities

See, the thing is that for me, when a book's main character measures the time in his life by the amount of times he's listened to a song (esp. a good song), I tend to fall in love with him a little. It's sort of the same for me when a main character is a photographer. And when you fall in love with a main character, you end up thinking more highly of the book involved and also..you forget that it's a work of fiction because it seems so real. Then, you have to consider that if every work of fiction is somewhat autobiographical, the author has pretty good taste...so good, in fact, that you feel some emotional connection even though you are never likely to meet.

Such is the case for Elif Shafak's The Saint of Incipient Insanities. In many show more ways, it's just as much a book about the immigrant university experience as it is relationships and intimacy, psychosis, and various personalities being thrown in the mix of postmodern soup. (We are past the primordial stages, are we not and no one uses the term premodern because we are always trying to present ourselves as more progressive) Alas, I'm diverging from this topic. This book gets a 4 instead of a 5 because I wasn't too thrilled with the ending as much as I wanted to be. It seemed too lucid and made up whereas Omer (the main character) putting on his headphones to blast The Dead Kennedys or Nick Cave made a whole lot more sense to me.


Oh and totally off topic but from now on, I'm going to refer to myself as a premodern being. I don't think the apocalypse is happening tomorrow. I think the world is going to drift into an endless decay of depression, recession, and global warming. Modern is the time we listen to Nick Cave. Postmodern is the time we wander around clinging to the only wasteland we have left. Get out your T.S. Elliot, folks. show less

This book is VERY INTERESTING . Shafak in this book portrays heart touching emotions, this book is an absolute masterpiece

This novel (the first in English by this Turkish author) is as great as its title.