Engaging and melancholy ... Fascinating rabbit holes ... Shafak’s language often takes on the cadence of a fable, a poetic rhythm that can vary between beauty and a tendency to hold the reader’s hand ... With gorgeous writing throughout and many particularly stunning paragraphs that you’ll want to mark up and return to, these are the moments when There Are Rivers in the Sky explodes into a roaring journey through ecology and memory ... When the puzzle pieces fit into place, and the fates of the present-day characters collide, the final twist is both contrived and genuinely moving.
The risk with multiple overlapping narratives is that the reader can become more invested in one. The pace of the longer descriptive passages is slower than the character-driven sections, but no less forceful or imaginative ... This novel moves between continents, centuries, cultures and communities with intelligence and ease. Shafak raises big ideas around artefacts and ownership of cultural heritage and handles them with care ... A tribute to the power of language.
Her fiction merges history and topicality, near and far, into a single stream. It blends saga and romance with a strain of lyrical idealism that celebrates the mingling and doubling of cultures and identities ... A novel that can on occasion edge towards a default tone of benign sententiousness ... Melds science, scholarship and myth, domestic drama and moralised history ... A hybrid entity.
Reading this novel is hard going. Much of this difficulty is to do with an overall bagginess ... One anxiety with a multi-perspective novel like this is that one storyline might overshadow others. Here, Zaleekhah’s sections don’t pack an emotional punch and the romantic arc is unsatisfyingly predictable.
Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device; her determination to trace connections is a matter of ambition, not merely aesthetics ... You can feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, and the almost breezy briskness with which it is relayed, but it is balanced by the delicacy of Shafak’s observations about human dynamics, the furtiveness of her characters’ most deeply held emotions and desires.
Shafak burnishes her reputation as a supreme storyteller. She displays profound wisdom and empathy, and encyclopaedic knowledge of the mythology of the part of the world in which she was raised. She enthrals us, all the while opening our eyes to how the sweep of nature, geography, culture, politics and religion have shaped humans throughout our history ... In the hands of a less accomplished writer, this multi-layered, time- and space-spanning story might have collapsed under its own weight. It is a tribute to Shafak’s skill that though it teeters at times, it never falls ... What Elif Shafak excels at, though, is making us understand that, despite the many ways humanity divides itself, we are all connected – by nature and also by the stories we pass from generation to generation.
I was impressed with the way Shafak has crafted an epic out of an epic. The magic of this novel lies in her skill at captivating readers with terrific storytelling while reminding us that human arrogance and frailty are too often the engines that drive history. The same creatures who can create great art and reach the pinnacle of civilization have an equally powerful — and terrifying — capacity to destroy it all.
At 464 pages, the book is a tad slow-paced at some instances. But that should not deter the avid reader. What might, however, is something else. While it’s true that Shafak manages to integrate numerous elements in her work with thorough, meticulous research, it’s also possible for readers to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, which may lead to a sense of the narrative being cluttered rather than balanced ... Shafak creates a dense narrative that demands careful attention and could also induce some polarization, especially with what is going on in the realm of geopolitics currently. The inclusion of magical realism adds another layer of intricacy, potentially confusing those who prefer a more straightforward storyline. This may lead to a reading experience that feels more challenging rather than engaging. When not managed well, this can alienate readers rather than draw them in. However, the beautiful prose, powerful analogies, well-crafted characters and the varied layers of meanings given to several elements balance things out.
Water is both the unifying image and the dominant concern of Elif Shafak’s gloriously expansive and intellectually rich There Are Rivers in the Sky ... this waterborne tale, crossing cultures, centuries and continents, is a magnificent achievement.
In this captivating and provocative saga, Shafak presents a beautifully braided plot, entrancing settings, and soulful characters while dramatizing the complex power of stories, the wonders of water, and the terrible paradoxes of humankind.
Shafak vividly narrates the theft of artifacts, war, colonialism, environmental crises, and genocide. From her extensive research, she raises critical questions about one’s connection to and responsibility for the past in this highly readable and engrossing novel.
Central to the novel is the subject of history itself — who owns it and who gets to tell it ... Her historical research is impressive, but its grand themes — colonial theft, environmental destruction, historic trauma — are rarely revealingly interrogated ... Everyone else is smothered beneath Shafak’s declamatory, pious lyricism ... Faux form of wisdom.
This weaving of the contemporary and the ancient, its lightly worn breadth and intellect, are a real literary achievement and few would complain if it garners the brilliant Turk a second Booker nod. How fitting, then, that such a deep seam of bibliophilia runs through this tale, one of printing presses and lost poems and books becoming wellsprings of curiosity and wonder.
Shafak is at home composing stories from multiple perspectives, and here moves easily between Arthur, Zaleekhah and Narin, but what grows between them is a confluence of themes and coincidences that, while illuminating the magic of storytelling, comes with a cost. Eager to uncover the connections between her characters’ lives, Shafak doesn’t give herself enough time to linger inside their heads. Nonetheless, she also remains loyal to reality’s refusal to be neatly tied up. She often leaves loose ends – unusually for a writer who relies so heavily on plot for momentum – and There are Rivers in the Sky is no exception. What happens to Narin’s father? Is the final transaction undertaken by Zaleekhah and Nen as morally clear-cut as we might so easily believe? And if her characters live on, complicatedly, beyond the page, she thereby leaves her readers with a bleak question: in such fractured and violent times, what kind of stories are we leaving for future generations to tell?
