Do you need a compelling story line?

The 2005 Independent Newspaper "Best Foreign Book of the Year" - The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak - certainly doesn't have a compelling plot.

What it does have, though, is three clever styles of writing:

1. The whole book is a "story within a story" - a bit like peeling away the layers of the onion skin. Some call this style Kafkaesque.

2. Play on the names of characters. e.g. Injustice Pureturk suffers terrible injustices (a style most famously associated with allegories such as Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan).

3.Regular mirror-image constructions in English grammar e.g. "The old man with a youthful voice speaking to a young man with a aged voice"

To read more ... see the link below for this week's book review on Turkish literature:

http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=...