The Guardian, UK
Oct 13 2006

A Nobel winner for our times

Margaret Atwood
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

‘Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth’
… Orhan Pamuk. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty

Orhan Pamuk, the celebrated Turkish novelist, has won the Nobel prize
for iterature. It would be difficult to conceive of a more perfect
winner for our catastrophic times. Just as Turkey stands at the
crossroads of the Muslim East/Middle East and the European and North
American west, so Pamuk’s work inhabits the shifting ground of an
increasingly dangerous cultural and religious overlap, where
ideologies as well as personalities collide.
It’s no exaggeration to say that you have to read Pamuk if you want
to begin to understand what’s going on in people’s hearts, minds and
souls, not only in Turkey, but also in Britain, where the current
Jack Straw headscarf controversy eerily mirrors the subject matter of
Pamuk’s recently-translated 1996 novel, Snow (in which we are
reminded that Ataturk’s ruthless modernisation campaign included a
much-disputed banning of headscarves.

Pamuk has felt the shockwaves from such factional collisions. He has
never been one to duck controversy: just a year ago he was facing
prosecution on charges of "un-Turkishness" – he’d been so rash as to
have mentioned the fate of the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th
century, a taboo subject for the authorities. Possibly in response to
international outcries, the charges were dropped, but many
lesser-known Turkish writers have not been so lucky.
He has already won many literary prizes, including the 2003 Dublin
Impac Award for his sixth novel, My Name Is Red. In Turkey, he is far
more than a novelist: people rush to read his novels as if he’s a
kind of sure-fire prophet, or a hugely popular singer, or a national
psychoanalyst or a one-man newspaper editorial page. There is nothing
programmatic about his novels; he simply writes out of the centre of
the whirlwind both his characters and his Turkish readers feel swept
up in every day.

Where is Turkey going? How will it come to terms with its
once-glorious, often-troubled history, and resolve the conflict
between old and new, and handle the power struggle between
secularists and Islamists, and find self-respect, or peace of mind,
or inner wholeness or a new direction? Pamuk’s novels don’t provide
cut-and-dried solutions, but they follow the tortuous lines of such
questionings with anguished and wrenching fidelity. Sometimes his
characters are almost literally torn apart by choices they don’t know
how to make, but are forced to make. His power as a novelist stems in
part from his refusal to judge the choices his characters make: their
tragedy is that no matter what path they take, they can’t be at ease;
and, worse, some other element in their society is bound to condemn
them.

Thus Pamuk’s heroes – they are typically heroes, not heroines –
wander through the plots of their books as if in caught in a
particularly anxious and threatening collective dream.

I wrote of his novel Snow in the New York Times Book Review: "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-loss, the
protagonist in exile – these are vintage Pamuk, but they’re also part
of the modern literary landscape."

It is not unusual for a Pamuk protagonist to end up dead at the hands
of persons unknown.

Pamuk’s heroes are pestered by Turkey’s former pre-eminence: they may
stumble upon architectural fragments of the huge, opulent Ottoman
empire, or see an Armenian church standing empty, or be reminded of
earlier Russian rulers, or glimpse a fly-spotted picture of the once
revered Ataturk, whose attempts to forge a fully westernised, secular
Turkey now seem futile. Where has all the power gone? such echoes
say. The Christian Byzantine city of Constantinople casts a long
shadow, and the European west and the Muslim east are seen as
mirror-opposite twins ensnared in a net that traps them both.

Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth.
Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience at a
particular place, in a particular time. And as with all great
literature, you feel at moments not that you are examining him, but
that he is examining you. "No one could understand us from so far
away," says a character in Snow. Reader, it’s a challenge.