GENRE: Fiction
LENGTH: 264 pages
PERSONAL RATING: 3/5
Buy this book here: https://amzn.to/3iWL4CW
Eyesight. One of the most important parts of our life, isn’t it? Most of our life is based on our perceptions, directly or indirectly. And our eyes are our gateway to this world of perceptions, views, notions and.. gazes. Our entire life is standing on the foundation of seeing and being seen, is the baseline of the book ‘The Gaze’ by Elif Shafak.
Elif Shafak is a renowned Turkish author, the mind behind one of the bestselling books ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’. In this book, The Gaze, Shafak tries to explain how the power of sight and the ability to see influences our own life and the lives of others around us. She does this with a series of different stories, but the main plot of the book is the story of a unique couple; an obese woman and her dwarf lover. Now we are already aware how this world treats people who are quite different than an average human. And this couple doesn’t receive a treatment any lesser than that. Sometimes fuelled of pity, sometimes disgust and sometimes surprise. Tired with that, they only find comfort in confiding themselves and their relationship in the four walls of their apartment. But one day, B-C, the male lover, comes up with two simultaneous ideas.
He is portrayed as an extremely quirky and opinionated man, with an unusual behaviour. He is working on a ‘Dictionary of Gazes’ wherein he lists many words alphabetically and tells short excerpts based on them, related to seeing. To get enough material for this, the couple starts going out in disguises and putting themselves in several situations which are not a part of their normal lives. But apart from this, the author includes a few abstract tales from different parts of the world, that emerge from the concept of being seen and seeing.
My honest opinion: While I absolutely adored the concept of the book, I didn’t much like the articulation. Abstract is the best word I can use for the entire book. The language at many places is quite irksome, and at many times you might want to stop reading it, because things are just not making sense. Either the metaphors are too complex or they are actually just written for the sake of being written. There are certain statements in the book, mostly gender biased, which I find stereotypical and problematic. This should have been avoided. And few concepts in these specific stories are a bit too much of exaggeration, even for fiction.
But there is one thing which is excellently highlighted and should be a lesson to everyone who reads it, is that how difficult life is for someone with appearances which are considered as ‘abnormal’. There is much people having them already go through, and us fellow humans with our behaviour marinate their wounds. We have to be better than that. We should treat someone on basis of their conduct and not appearance. Everyone knows this, but less people follow. I appreciate this effort of Shafak’s, but overall, this could have been much better.
Books and Babble 