Cornucopia – September 2005
“The Saint of Incipient Insanities confirms Elif Shafak’s membership of a new wave of Turkish literary and artistic figures who travel unencumbered across cultural boundaries… She has no villains and she displays enough sympathy for her cast to leave at least some of their mysteries intact. The stories are by turns funny and bleak, like an episode of Friends written by Jean-Paul Sartre… She tells her stories quickly and with the skill to introduce farce when we are expecting the worst, and poignancy when we ache for comic relief… She is at her best, however, when displaying the old-fashioned, Trollope-like virtue of stripping away pretensions.”
-- Andrew Finkel

Boston Globe – November 7, 2004
“It is a paradigm of the new American melting pot, the Somerville apartment where much of this voluble, high-energy novel takes place, a vat in which nothing melts but only gets mulled and muddled in contact with all the other exotic ingredients...[Shafak] celebrates her foreignness with baroque flourishes of insight issuing from somewhere through the looking glass.”
-- Amanda Heller

Orlando Sentinel – November 7, 2004
“The college novel has a long tradition, but the focus here on immigrant students – and the storytelling of Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, writing in English for the first time – elevates this book to a different plane… It ends up being a mixture of comedy and drama, all driven by colorful, complex characters, truly strangers in this strange land who find some kind of home and a variation on the American dream… It makes for a great combination: a rich, satisfying and utterly traditional manner of storytelling with an up-to-the-minute contemporary theme.”
-- William McKeen

San Francisco Chronicle – November 7, 2004
“It's hard to sum up the plot of Incipient Insanities... Shafak's real focus is language, both as tool and theme… When Shafak looks at America from the outside, the results are hilarious. In one passage, the roommates list the obvious signage with which Americans label everything. The Saint of Incipient Insanities reflects the United States, not through a mirror but a kaleidoscope, as the characters notice all the things we see too often to note.”
-- Malena Watrous

The Washington Post – October 31, 2004
“Exuberant... wacky… occasionally brilliant… The true center of Shafak's novel is language itself. Words fill every inch of the frame, cavorting, crowding, parading, nesting within each other and leering from corners like the teeming figures in a Bosch painting -- words that can unlock the secrets of a culture or, just as easily, obscure them further…. There are serendipitous gems to be found in Shafak's prose… [and] a sharp eye for American absurdity... Her message, shorn of linguistic flourishes, is simple and deeply humanist. Life in the borderless modern world can bring all but the strongest to the brink of incipient insanity.
-- Janice P. Nimura

Booklist (Starred Review) – September 15, 2004
“Three roommates, Omer, Abed, and Piyu, are all foreigners, studying and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts... Together, these three friends experience love, exile, and a lack of cultural identity, as they forge ahead with their lives in a new land, with relationships with new people, confronting their greatest joys alongside their worst nightmares. Elif Shafak is a prizewinning author who, until now, has only written in her native Turkish. This is her first novel in English, and she presents a masterful command of language, which she uses cleverly, humorously, and engagingly.”
-- Michael Spinella

The Economist – August 12, 2004
“Ms Shafak has woven a tragi-comic tapestry of quirky and lovable 20-somethings struggling to find themselves in America... [Orhan] Pamuk was educated in English at an elite Istanbul private school; Ms Shafak was born in France and raised in Spain. Their books are as much a voyage of discovery for themselves as they are insiders' insights of Turkey. Both seek to shatter stereotypes. Unlike Mr. Pamuk, though, Ms Shafak does it with ironic humour and warmth... Ms Shafak is well set to challenge Mr. Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist.”