Incipient Insanities

A couple of weeks ago, Randa mentioned Elif Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities favorably in her “new releases” column. The book gets a capsule review in the Boston Globe by Amanda Heller who finds it has “shades of Zadie Smith’s multicultural carnival” (um, what?) and that the author’s language is a bit “out of register.” Shafak is a Turkish author; this is her first English-language novel. And, speaking of Turkish literature, Orhan Pamuk is profiled in this SB Tribune article.