Times Online, UK
Books
April 02, 2005
Ottoman of his time
By Jason Goodwin
In Turkey his novels, chronicling the country’s upheavals, have made him as
famous as a footballer. But Orhan Pamuk says it’s time to stop speaking for
the nation and tell his own stories
Remember angst? Germans produced it, where the French had anomie; and we all
know melancholy and tristesse. Now Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s leading novelist,
and in Istanbul the chronicler of the inescapable decline of the great
Ottoman metropolis and the disintegration of the Pamuk family within it, has
given us hüzün. It’s hüzün when wealth ebbs away; when the lovely wooden
mansions of the pashas burn to the ground; when Pamuk’s mother sits up late,
smoking and half-watching the TV, waiting for her erring husband to get
home. Even love is doomed, for old-fashioned reasons: Pamuk wants to become
an artist, and a nice girl won’t marry one in 1960s Istanbul. In Istanbul
Pamuk writes: `I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same
house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate: I am attached to
this city because it has made me who I am.’
What with this and that and a cartoon portrait of the author which recently
appeared in The Guardian, I half expected to find Pamuk the jowly
personification of Balkan gloom when I met him in New York last week. Not
without cause, perhaps: last month, Pamuk made an off-the-cuff
acknowledgement of Turkey’s responsibility for the death of a million
Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. His remarks provoked
outrage in his native land, where he is famous like a footballer. Though his
novels revel in clever postmodern games and tread unerringly on ground Pamuk
shares with writers such as Borges and García Márquez, his 2001 novel My
Name Is Red became the fastest selling book in Turkish history; elsewhere it
also cemented his reputation as a master storyteller. It was followed in
2003 by Snow, a political thriller and love story of fierce imaginative
scope: if ever you find yourself justifying secular values to a religious
assassin, the dialogue has been written by Pamuk. His books, he says as we
order lunch, have been translated into 36 languages. He isn’t boasting: it’s
just that he has to get things right.
Pamuk is a tall, lightly built man of 53. He speaks English fluently, and is
neatly dressed in a white shirt and a black corduroy jacket; in his
gold-rimmed spectacles he resembles a sort of Turkish Harry Potter. As for
that portrait: `The Guardian people told me it was their policy to make
authors look ugly.’ He pauses, laughs. `I’ll sue them!’
`I’ve written 240 pages a year, for the past 30 years,’ he reminds me more
than once. He would know the exact average: with all his charm, Pamuk is a
precise and hard-driven craftsman, clamped to his desk 11 hours a day,
re-reading pitilessly, cutting `like a ruthless Hollywood producer. For me
being a fiction writer is imposing self-torture.’ To get period details
correct he reads old newspapers; for his English translations he goes over
the text with his translator line by line. Outside dialogue, there’s no
slang in his prose. `I use the Turkish of my mother and my grandmother.’ He
writes with a fountain pen.
>From our table we watch a tug foaming against the current, while across the
water the city stands silhouetted in the spring sunshine. A patrol boat
idles for a moment near the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then speeds
off towards Pier 47. `New York,’ says Pamuk, `is my second city.’
In 1985 he followed his wife there for her PhD in Ottoman history. (They
were divorced four years ago, but back in Istanbul Pamuk still regularly
drops round for meals with her and their 15-year-old daughter.) They stayed
in New York for three years, at a time when his international reputation was
beginning to grow. `I was 33. It was flattering.’ At Columbia he found
students of Turkish studying his own first novel, while The White Castle, a
story about a 17th-century Muslim master and Christian slave who swap
places, had just been published in translation.
`My first time I was enchanted, bewitched by NY; but I can’t say I liked it.
I was happy because my marriage was happy. This library – two million books,
a cubicle.’ He wrote The Black Book there, but New York never opened out to
him like Istanbul. `I was an outsider. In Istanbul I know what’s happening
behind the windows, but here it was all blank – except the novels of Saul
Bellow and Paul Auster.’
He is, by his own admission, a very bookish man. When he talks about his
craft his head sinks forward in an attitude of earnest concentration and his
speech is fast. Between the ages of seven and 22 he wanted to be an artist,
until everyone persuaded him that Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s was too
poor and provincial a place for a serious artist to make a living. Yet being
a novelist, he thinks, repeats the same `essential gesture of being alone in
a room and attempting to legitimise your fantasies’.
The opening chapter of Istanbul describes the sense he possessed as a child
of there being another Pamuk living somewhere in the city; another him,
unknown and unseen. Years later he discovered his father’s secret love-nest
to be a copy of his parents’ room at home, down to the bridge books
teetering on the bedside table. Doubles inhabit almost all his fictions: he
calls them `two sides of the same psychic focus, persona, and never
symmetrical’. He finds himself increasingly drawn to explore the role of
those westernised elites which, like his own, mediate between the local
cultural tradition of the people and the expectations of the wider world,
and are to some extent alienated from both. `A subject I love is that of the
true believer who has doubts, and the true atheist who has secret beliefs,’
he says. `I imply that no one can be completely one thing. If you think you
are a perfect Muslim or modernist, you have a problem.’
He admits to seeing something in his `second city’ which shadows Istanbul.
`It’s that the streets are crowded – a sense that so much is going on. This
is a cultural and economic capital, and it’s so complex. We are the edge of
the water – Istanbul is so open to its water.’ He suspects that the cities
share a certain energy – `though it’s my joke that we only have this energy
on the streets in Istanbul because there’s no subway’. The prevailing mood
of the two cities could not be less similar.
The end-of-empire melancholy, the particular resignation of his home city,
shares nothing with New York. `Istanbul – tristesse! New York – success!’ He
won’t be writing a New York novel. It’s just a place to work, a set of
books, closed doors, beautiful views. A refuge.
Before we leave the restaurant, Pamuk does a quick sketch in my copy of
Istanbul of the skyline framed in the windows overlooking the East River. I
ask him if he’s going back to work and he says no, today’s a holiday for
him, he’s going to buy himself a pair of shoes at Macy’s. One of his black
brogues is peeling from the toe. It’s a beautiful day, the first day of the
New York spring, and we agree to walk uptown, over the Brooklyn Bridge and
up on to Broadway. I can tell from the easy way he swings through the crowds
that he enjoys the exercise as much as the colour of downtown Manhattan.
Turkey’s prospective entry into the EU he sees in terms of stories: in this
case, the stories that a nation tells itself. The collapse of the Ottoman
Empire after the First World War was a trauma for the Turks, prompting a
retreat into inwardness and isolation. At some level, as Istanbul suggests,
the Turks learnt to derive a gloomy satisfaction from their own abrupt
demotion from power status to insignificance, a certain pride in their
collective recognition of the h üzün of end-of-empire.
While happy to lend his support to Turkey’s entry into the EU, Pamuk, who
has been a vociferous supporter of human rights and the rights of minorities
in Turkey, no longer feels the same need to speak out. Death threats and a
potential court prosecution followed his well-publicised reference to the
Armenian massacres. But he acknowledges that Turkey has travelled a long way
towards creating a more open, pluralistic society. There’s also the issue of
what he owes to himself as a writer. If the Turks need a new story as part
of their move into the European mainstream, it’s not his job, he thinks, to
find them one.
The process of adaptation will be as hard as writing, but `with freedom of
speech, with the spirit of creativity, they will invent a new past’. The
Turkey of his childhood had become `scared of its own imagination’. But the
situation has moved on already, with encouraging signs everywhere of colour
returning: his Istanbul describes a city that his own daughter might find it
hard to recognise. `In 20 years she will read this book and say: Daddy, you
are such a sad man!’ `The child inside will come out,’ he predicts.
`Imagination can serve the country better than suppression. Xenophobia and
nationalism will fade away as Turks grow proud of that imagination.’ Ottoman
history needn’t be a catalogue of martial glories: an unexpected prod in the
right direction has come from Israel. `They said: `You Turks treated the
Jews well.’ Sometimes these things get forgotten.’
But he no longer feels he must speak for Turkey, in his fiction at least. `I
have another five or seven novels I want to write,’ he says. `I’m not
looking at literature as representing a country or a culture but as
representing myself. I have to catch my demons rather than catch Turkey’s
demons. I think that the country is becoming a more bourgeois civil society
so I think my demons will be, in the end, more representative.’
A quarter of a billion people, he observes, speak Turkish. `The structure of
Turkish is that the verb is at the end; so that what will happen is a
surprise.’
Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk is published by Faber & Faber, £16.99 (offer,
£13.59).