NOBEL-WINNER PAMUK FINDS INSPIRATION IN LONELINESS, SELF-DOUBT AND ANGER
By Karl Ritter, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Worldstream
December 7, 2006 Thursday 7:22 PM GMT
Nobel literature winner Orhan Pamuk said on Thursday the secret to
good writing is stubbornness and patience and that inspiration hits
an author in moments of utter solitude and self-doubt.
The Turkish author also revealed he is driven by passion, curiosity
and even rage.
"I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone," he said
in a Nobel Prize lecture dedicated in large part to his late father. "I
write because I never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."
Pamuk, 54, is to collect his 10 million kronor (euro1.1 million; US$1.4
million) award in a ceremony on Sunday. By tradition, the literature
prize winner delivers a lecture to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Unlike last year’s winner Harold Pinter, Pamuk did not use his lecture
for political commentary, but focused on the sometimes agonizing
craft of writing.
"The writer’s secret is not inspiration for it is never clear where
it comes from it is his stubbornness, his patience," Pamuk said.
"The angel of inspiration … favors the hopeful and the confident"
and appears "when a writer feels mostly lonely, when he feels most
doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing."
Pamuk’s life and works illustrate the struggle to find a balance
between East and West, a topic he touched on several times during his
lecture by referring to his father’s library, with Western literature
at one end and Turkish books at the other.
"I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee
to the West just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books
in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture,
which we found so lacking," Pamuk said.
"What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a
young man: for me the center of the world is Istanbul."
In pronouncing the Istanbul-born writer the winner of its prestigious
prize in October, the Swedish Academy said Pamuk "in the quest for
the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols
for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
The announcement was met a mixed reaction in his homeland, where
nationalists professed shame at the selection of a man who speaks of
the oppression of Armenians and Kurds, while many writers called it
a historic moment for their rich literary tradition.
"What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are
humanity’s basic fears," Pamuk said, adding they include the fear
of being left outside, of feeling worthless and vulnerable "and the
nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind."
"We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the
Western world and I can identify with them easily succumbing to fears
that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their
fears of humiliation and their sensitivities," he said.
"I also know that in the West a world with which I can identify
with the same ease nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in
their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to
a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid."
Concluding his lecture, titled "My Father’s Suitcase," Pamuk recalled
that his father, who died in 2002, was so impressed by his first
novel that he predicted the then 22-year-old Pamuk would go on to
receive the highest accolade in literature.
"He told me that one day I would win the prize that I am here to
receive with such great happiness," Pamuk said.