Turkish Writer Wins Nobel in Literature

By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 12, 2006

LONDON, Oct. 12 – The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose exquisitely
constructed, wistful prose explores the agonized dance between Muslims
and the west and between past and present, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in
Literature today.

Announcing the award from Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said in a
statement that Mr. Pamuk’s `quest for the melancholic soul of his
native city’ had led him to discover `new symbols for the clash and
interlacing of cultures.’

Mr. Pamuk, 54, is Turkey’s best-known and best-selling novelist but
also an increasingly divisive figure in a nation pulled in many
directions at once. A champion of freedom of speech at a time when
insulting `Turkishness’ is a criminal offense, he has run afoul of
Islamists who resent his Western secularism, and Turkish nationalists
who object to his unflinching, sometimes unflattering portrayal of
their country.

The Swedish Academy never offers nonliterary reasons for its choices
and presents itself as being uninfluenced by politics. But last year’s
winner, the British playwright Harold Pinter, is a prominent critic of
the British and American governments, and there were political
implications once again in the choice of Mr. Pamuk.

`You’re beginning to notice a certain sensitivity to trends – they are
giving the prize as a symbolic statement for one thing or another,’
Arne Ruth, former editor-in-chief of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter,
said in an interview. Of Mr. Pamuk, he said: `he is a symbol of the
relationship between Europe and Turkey, and they couldn’t have
overlooked this when they made their choice.’

Mr. Pamuk, who said in 2004 that he has begun `to get involved in a
sort of political war against the Turkish state and the
establishment,’ is currently spending a semester teaching at Columbia
University in New York.

Nationalist Turks have not forgiven Mr. Pamuk for an interview with a
Swiss magazine in 2005 in which he denounced the mass killings of
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the killing of
Kurds by Turkey in the 1980’s. He narrowly escaped trial when the
remarks were deemed anti-Turkish and a group of nationalists initiated
a criminal case against him; the charges were dropped on a
technicality last January. Accepting a literary award in Germany in
2005, he said: "The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is
resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey."

Because of the deeply mixed feelings Mr. Pamuk inspires back home,
some prominent Turks had to walk a fine line today, expressing pride
while trying to play down the significance of his political views.

`I want to believe that the Nobel Prize was given to him purely on his
literary talents, but not political declarations,’ Egemen Bagis, a
member of Parliament from the ruling Justice and Development party,
said. At the same time, Mr. Bagis said that the prize `shows how far
Turkey has come in its contribution to the world’s arts and
literature.’

In a brief interview with the Swedish newspaper Svenska Daglabet,
Mr. Pamuk said today that he was `very happy and honored’ and trying
`to recover from the shock.’

Born to a wealthy, secular family of industrialists in Istanbul in
195, Mr. Pamuk originally meant to be an architect. But he defied
family pressures, quit architecture school and became instead a
full-time writer, publishing his first novel, `Cevdet Bey and Sons,’
about three generations of a family, in 1982.

Among his best known works is `My Name is Red.’ The novel, first
published in Turkey in 1998 and subsequently translated into 24
languages, introduced Mr. Pamuk to a wider audience and cemented his
international reputation. Set over nine winter days in 16th-century
Istanbul, it is at once a mystery, an intellectual puzzle and a
romance with a range of narrators, including a murder victim who opens
the novel by saying, `I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the
bottom of a well.’ In 2003, it won the $127,000 IMPAC Dublin literary
prize.

`Nothing changed in my life since I work all the time,’ Mr. Pamuk said
at the time. `I’ve spent 30 years writing fiction. For the first 10
years, I worried about money and no one asked me how much money I
made. The second decade I spent money and no one was asking me about
that. And I’ve spent the last 10 years with everyone expecting to hear
how I spend the money, which I will not do.’

`Snow,’ published in the United States in 2004, expands further on
themes – alienation, religion, modernization, the hidden corners of
Turkey – that Mr. Pamuk has explored over and over in his
work. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood
called the novel `not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but
essential reading for our times.’ The Turkish public reads
Mr. Pamuk’s work, she said, `as if taking its own pulse.’

Ms. Atwood continued: `The twists of fate, the plots that double back
on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they’re
approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of
identity lost, the protagonist in exile – these are vintage Pamuk, but
they’re also part of the modern literary landscape.’

Mr. Pamuk was quick to denounce the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over
Mr. Rushdie’s work `The Satanic Verses.’ In 1998, he turned down the
title of state artist in Turkey, saying, `I don’t know why they tried
to give me the prize.’

Mr. Pamuk’s Nobel comes at a particularly tricky moment for Turkey,
whose efforts to join the European Union are viewed with suspicion by
its own nationalists, by Europeans who worry about the country’s high
proportion of Islamists, and by European governments, who are
insisting that it first adhere to Western standards in human rights
and justice.

Coincidentally today, a bill that would make it a crime to deny that
the Turkish killing of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 constituted
genocide was passed in the lower house of the French Parliament. And
from Armenia, the foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, praised what he
said were Mr. Pamuk’s courageous words about the past, in a statement
that is bound to irritate Turkey.

`Orhan Pamuk ventured into issues of memory and identity, and with
intellectual courage and honesty, explored his own history, and
therefore ours,’ Mr. Oskanian said in an e-mail message to The New
York Times. `We welcome this decision and only wish that this kind of
intellectual sincerity and candor will lead the way to acknowledging
and transcending this painful, difficult period of our peoples’ and
our countries’ history.’

Reporting was contributed by Ivar Ekman from Stockholm, C.J. Chivers
from Moscow, Nina Bernstein from New York and Sebnem Arsu from
Istanbul.