Bloomberg
Oct 13 2006
Nobelist Pamuk Reflects on East and West in Novels (Correct)
By Hephzibah Anderson
(Corrects Turkey’s position on genocide in World War I in last
paragraph.)
Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — As cheers greet the naming of Orhan Pamuk as
literature’s newest Nobel laureate, his political bravery shouldn’t
eclipse his intellectual credentials.
By comparison with the work of those in whose pantheon he now finds
himself, the Turkish author’s oeuvre might indeed seem slim. Last
year’s winner, Harold Pinter, has to his name 29 plays, 24
screenplays, and assorted volumes of prose and poetry. When German
author Gunter Grass won in 1999, his output in English translation
alone topped 20 works of fact and fiction. And by the time the
prolific V.S. Naipaul was summoned to Stockholm in 2001, he could
show off 14 books about him.
Pamuk, 54, has written seven novels, two works of non- fiction and a
screenplay, of which half-a-dozen are currently available in English.
These encompass a whodunit, a family saga and a haunting political
thriller. Though they unfold against disparate temporal backdrops
spanning more than five centuries, it is the urgent contemporaneity
of Pamuk’s themes that unites them.
In particular, he is preoccupied with the meeting of East and West,
suggesting that it’s an encounter still more complicated than we
imagine.
Born in Istanbul in 1952, Pamuk was alert to the Western influences
affecting his traditional Ottoman home. He draws on this
autobiographical material in his first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His
Sons,” which was published in 1982 and tells the story of one family
over three generations.
Civil Strife
A second novel, “The House of Silence,” appeared the following
year, using five narrative perspectives to capture simmering civil
strife at a Turkish seaside resort in 1980.
His third novel, “The White Castle,” appeared in 1985 and five
years later became his first to be translated into English. Set in
17th-century Istanbul, it is an allegorical tale depicting a slave
and a scholar who find themselves through each other’s life stories,
underscoring a notion of unstable identity that becomes a recurring
motif in his work. It’s especially prominent in his next novel, “The
Black Book” (Turkish 1990, English 1994), whose central character
swaps identity with his missing wife’s half-brother.
“The New Life” (Turkish 1994, English 1997) centers on a miraculous
book with the power to change forever the life of any person who
reads it, but it was Pamuk’s sixth novel that gave him his
breakthrough in the U.S. and the U.K. “My Name is Red” (Turkish
1998, English 2001) is an exhilarating detective story set in a time
of violent fundamentalism — Istanbul in the late 1590s. Like “The
New Life,” it has a book at its heart, this time a highly
controversial tome commissioned in secret by the sultan.
Risky Enterprise
Though its text celebrates the glories of his realm, the sultan has
requested figurative, European-style illustrations, and it’s these
that make the book such a risky enterprise. When one of the chosen
artists disappears, a suspenseful tale of love and deception
develops, as much a philosophical mystery as a whodunit.
The novel went on to win the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary
Award, currently worth 100,000 euros ($125,325).
In 2002, Pamuk followed “My Name is Red” with “Snow” (English
2004), a thriller set during the 1990s, whose poet protagonist finds
himself caught up in a military coup in a Turkish border town. Begun
before Sept. 11, it’s Pamuk’s most overtly political novel to date,
and dramatizes the conflict between Islamists and the secular forces
of Westernization.
Maze-Like City
Throughout his career, Pamuk’s native Istanbul has been more than a
backdrop. A place he revisits time and again in his fiction, it is a
character and a muse, and in 2003 he paid it homage in a non-fiction
love letter, “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (English 2005).
He sees this maze-like city and its rich, tumultuous history as being
defined by “huzun,” a Turkish word signifying a profound sense of
spiritual loss and melancholy longing. The portrait that emerges is
deeply personal, and he braids Istanbul’s history with vignettes from
his own, permitting glimpses of his parents’ troubled marriage, his
eccentric grandmother, and his early literary stirrings.
Narrating His Country
Reviewing “Snow” in the New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood
suggested that Pamuk was engaged in a “longtime project: narrating
his country into being.” If this truly is his ultimate aim, he is
likely to find himself spending more time in the political limelight.
This will not be easy. His willingness to state that Turkey
persecuted the Armenians during World War I provoked anger in a
country that refuses to admit any genocide during World War I and
charged him with insulting the nation. These charges were dropped in
January, but the issue simmers among others involving Islam’s role in
modern life. Yet if any artist can pull off the trick of being
political and imaginative, it’s likely to be Pamuk.