CONTROVERSIAL MASTER OF DIZZYING AMBIGUITY
by Heidi Maier
The Courier Mail (Australia)
October 21, 2006 Saturday
First with the news Edition
Orhan Pamuk’s works divide his nation, writes Heidi Maier
Entering into the world that is The Black Book is a dizzying,
unconventional experience . . .
WHEN the news emerged last week from Sweden that Turkish writer Orhan
Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the condemnation and
criticism were both fierce and unsurprising.
Regarded by many as a deserving but controversial winner, Pamuk is
his country’s best-known and best-selling novelist, but he is also
regarded by many there as a traitor and a criminal.
In late 2005, Pamuk was pilloried by conservatives when he spoke out
on two of Turkey’s most politically and historically sensitive issues
— claims that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians
nine decades ago and the plight of ethnic Kurds in modern-day Turkey.
He was acquitted in January of criminal charges of denigrating his
country, but Pamuk remains a man who uneasily inhabits a country
wherein he is a hero to Istanbul liberals, but reviled by nationalists.
His winning the Nobel Prize, for which he beat prolific American
writer Joyce Carol Oates and Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said, comes hot
on the heels of the publication, by Faber and Faber, of a new English
translation of Pamuk’s sprawling fantasist novel, The Black Book.
A hugely innovative literary writer, Pamuk’s greatest influence in
writing the novel was James Joyce’s Ulysses and it shows. Perhaps
more so than in any of his other novels, The Black Book is a work
that delights in its mastery of ambiguity and the ingenious, often
perplexing, ways in which Pamuk toys with the reader’s preconceptions
and understandings of the world as we know it.
Like other modern fantasists such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino
and, more recently, Jeanette Winterson, Pamuk’s epic narrative about
a lawyer searching for his lost wife in Istanbul, revels in usurping
and reconfiguring the very dualities and dichotomies in which it is
seemingly grounded.
What sets Pamuk apart from these other writers, however, is his wilful
refusal to offer the reader any answers, easy or otherwise.
The Black Book opens with two of its main protagonists, married couple
Ruya and Galip, emerging from sleep, the sounds and smells of the
bustling city outside their hotel room infiltrating their dream world.
We learn that “the first sounds of the winter morning penetrated
the room: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of an old bus,
the rattle of the copper kettles that the salep maker shared with the
pasty cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at the dolmu stop”.
It is the first of many descriptions — intense and evocative —
that characterise this new translation, further revealing what many
consider to be Pamuk’s masterwork as a novel rich in colourful,
often seductive, geographical and descriptive detail.
Marketed to Western readers as a sort of literary whodunit in which an
increasingly tired and frustrated lawyer traverses Turkey’s capital
in search of his missing wife, The Black Book is more Borgesian
labyrinth than conventional mystery. Lovers of such novels — in which
resolutions are tidy and assured — may find entry into Pamuk’s world
more a strange and disappointing mistake than a rewarding endeavour.
Yet it is the very subversiveness and elusiveness that characterise
both Pamuk’s narrative and the fanciful, other-worldly prose that,
in part, make this novel such an extraordinary work. Multi-layered and
profoundly allegorical, this is a tale in which the city of Istanbul
is as much a character as any of the human protagonists.
For much of the novel, the narrative consists of a surreal intertext
that weaves together Galip’s existential musings and discoveries with
newspaper columns by Jelal, the half-brother he is convinced his wife
has absconded with to begin a new life.
The tools of magical realism that Pamuk employs to tell his story
— unconventional and disquieting as it often is — are regarded by
many writers and critics alike as a postmodern way of subverting from
within, or an approach that blunts the hard-edged political commentary
with which the author has become associated in recent years.
The Black Book is an unwieldy work that defies the conventions or
categories of most genres and, in doing so, is as much a pleasure to
read as it is an unerring frustration.
In large part an exercise in magical realism, it is also a decidedly
contemporary narrative that conveys a world of troubled, and troubling,
double standards, identities, and disquieting, ever-shifting personal,
political and geographical boundaries.
Maureen Freely’s translation reveals the novel to be more than mere
literary artifice, making apparent the myriad ways in which Pamuk
explores the themes that have always preoccupied and dominated
his work.
Questions of modernity, identity, mystery, Westernisation and the
culture of Islam permeate this text in ways that are at once so
subtle and so overt that both their mind-boggling implications and
the author’s steady, almost imperceptible way of inserting them into
the text itself are easily glossed over on a first reading.
Entering into the world that is The Black Book is a dizzying,
unconventional experience wherein many small stories are fused together
in a most beguiling and singular fashion, ultimately creating a novel
that, as Galip himself notes, plunges the reader headlong into misery
and then, finally, back into the messy business that is life.
The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely. (Faber
and Faber $22.95)