A NOBLE CONSCIENCE
By Nahal Toosi
Associated Press
Providence Journal, Rhode Island
Nov 13 2006
In another life, Orhan Pamuk could have been an escape artist.
Spend an hour with him, and you quickly wonder if he wants to be
somewhere else, or even someone else. Ask him, and he’ll admit that
not being Orhan Pamuk is a constant fantasy.
But Pamuk has good reason to be himself these days. For years, he
has been regarded as a novelist of exceptional talent. Now, he’s a
Nobel Prize-winning novelist of exceptional talent.
What does that mean for a man who wrote he once believed there was
another Orhan somewhere?
Mostly just relief.
"The beautiful part of this prize is that I’m pleased from now on
nobody else will ask me, ‘Will you get the Nobel Prize?’ "
Pamuk says, laughing.
The Nobel is a coda to an extraordinary decade in the 30-year career
of Turkey’s most famous writer – one of steep rise in global exposure.
His works have now been translated into more than 40 languages. He has
traveled to more than 20 countries to promote them. Along the way,
he has made his share of political statements, one of which led to
a trial in Turkey on the charge of "insulting Turkishness."
Meanwhile, the drumbeat for the Nobel grew louder and more maddening.
In a recent interview at Columbia University, where he is a fellow,
Pamuk insisted that the Nobel would not change his character or work
habits, but he also expressed exhaustion with the people who comb
everything he says and writes for controversy. He seems unsure if
the Nobel will be more of a shield or a magnifying glass.
"Politics do not influence my work; politics have influenced my life,
actually," he says. "In fact, I am doing my utmost to preserve my
work from politics."
Pamuk is a tall, slender 54-year-old, with a slightly pudgy face,
almond eyes, ill-fitting glasses and rumpled hair. He laughs loudly,
isn’t above wagging his finger over questions he deems objectionable,
and describes himself as a lover of solitude with a restless
imagination.
"I have this urge to stop this life and start afresh," he says. "I
am in a train, and the train goes into a town, or it passes close
to houses. . . . You see inside the house where a man,
a family, a TV is on, they’re sitting at a table. You see a life there.
There’s an immense impulse to be there, to be them, to be like them."
Pamuk was born into a wealthy family in Istanbul, and defines himself
as Muslim "culturally," with religion never playing much of a role in
his upbringing. In his early 20s, disillusioned with his architecture
studies and painting aspirations, he decided he would write. It was
nearly a decade before he was published.
"Till the age of 30, my father gave me pocket money," he says.
His artistic skills have influenced his structurally complex, visually
piercing novels. He counts among his inspirations Proust and Tolstoy,
and says he loves philosophically and emotionally layered works such
as The Possessed and Anna Karenina.
His own lyrical, dreamlike stories – often drenched in melancholy –
seek harmony in discord, but don’t always find it.
In Snow, his most overtly political novel, Pamuk writes about the
plight of young Muslim girls who wished to wear headscarves in
school but faced legal obstacles in secular Turkey. In the book,
published in the United States in 2004, every character’s point of
view seems to have merit, and in it, both secularists and Islamists in
Turkey found much to like and hate. The topic was especially touchy,
considering the ongoing debate in Turkey over the country’s bid to
join the European Union, a move Pamuk has openly supported.
The push and pull in Turkey, a country that straddles two continents
and has deep religious and secular convictions, haunt Pamuk’s work.
Besides Snow, his best-known novels in the United States are The
Black Book and My Name Is Red. Another well-received book, Istanbul,
is part memoir, part history of the home city Pamuk adores.
Pamuk spends years exploring themes before an idea is transformed
into a book. He still writes in longhand with a fountain pen.
"One of the wonderful joys of writing novels is not the writing, but
fantasizing about other novels one day you will write," he says. "I
have notebooks, notes, so much material about the novels I may someday
write. Then, of course you realistically know you cannot write all
of these novels. But it’s like fantasizing another life.
. . . I like doing that."
He doesn’t believe his best work is behind him, but says the Nobel
is unlikely to be a crutch.
"I’m sure that after two months when I write a page that I’m not
sure about the quality, that I will be upset," he says. "I will be
tormented again if I think that the sentence I’m writing is not good.
No Nobel Prize – no nothing helps that. You’re alone there."
He hopes the Nobel, Turkey’s first, has a positive impact on other
Turkish writers, but he is not convinced that it will protect him
from future political persecution, noting that he was already very
famous when he was put on trial last year.
Pamuk was charged after telling a Swiss publication that Turkey was
unwilling to deal with painful parts of its history involving the
massacres of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was
not a genocide, and the killings of many in its Kurdish population.
The charge was dropped on a technicality in January.
He insists that he is merely "a novelist" writing about what he knows
and what interests him, but that others have interpreted his works
as political commentary during what are tense times between the West
and the Muslim world.
Still, it doesn’t take much to make him say something political. It
is as if he can’t bear to not be honest.
"It’s a conscience," said Maureen Freely, who has known Pamuk for many
years and served as a translator for him. "If it’s important, he’ll say
something. It’s something he regards as a duty he can’t run away from."
Orham Pamuk will be at Brown University tomorrow as a participant
in a sold-out, three-day public event titled Strange Times, My Dear:
A Freedom-to-Write Literary Festival.
"Politics do not influence my work; politics have influenced my
life, actually. In fact, I am doing my utmost to preserve my work
from politics."
Orhan Pamuk "Politics do not influence my work; politics have
influenced my life, actually. In fact, I am doing my utmost to preserve
my work from politics."