What has happened to the belief that social media can create a new and better world?
Two of the most intriguing walk-on characters in Elif Shafak’s How to Stay Sane are the little Egyptian girl named “Facebook” by her parents in that brief, optimistic phase of the Arab spring – and another baby given the name “Like” in Israel just a few months later. They are poignant reminders of another age in which social media looked set to deliver a new and better world. It is hard not to wonder, as Shafak does, what has become of this pair. “Do they view the buoyancy that presided when they were born as a relic of the past … ?” Or to put it more simply, “what on earth have they done with their names?” Discarded them at the earliest opportunity would be my guess – whether because of the misplaced optimism with which their parents had branded them, or simple embarrassment in the playground.
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division is a sharp and elegant pamphlet of just 90 pages. Though better known as a novelist (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker last year), Shafak is a political theorist by academic training. Here she combines her two skills, drawing on some of her favourite fictional themes (the complexities of storytelling, multiple identities, women’s voices) to dissect the anger and anxieties of contemporary society, and the disappointments so neatly symbolised by the names of little Facebook and Like.
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