Short Book Review: Elif Shafak’s “How to Stay Sane In an Age of Division”
The pocket-sized book “How to Stay Sane In an Age of Division” is a manifesto for the minorities who have experienced emotional abuse and desperately, but buried under a calm surface, need to heal. What I find amazing in the writer Shafak is that she effortlessly combines her feelings living in the modern society with a well-structured political message of “The Storyland”. Her writing style is strikingly similar to that of Susan Sontag, and this manifesto reminds me of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in its sharp sensibility in current societal issues, or maybe its portability.
Elif Shafak is an empowering writer who is very interested in the minorities. Her opinion on writing is that “ Our job is to bring the periphery to the center, make the invisible more visible, create open and democratic spaces wherein the story can flow freely”.
