The Daily Star, Lebanon
Oct 13 2006

Outstanding – and outspoken – Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wins Nobel
Prize for Literature
Writer recently occupied international spotlight not for his work but
as a target of his country’s prosecutors

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Friday, October 13, 2006

BEIRUT: His name has been floated for years now, with bookies often
quoting the odds in his favor over a pack of strong contenders –
including Syrian poet Adonis, American novelist Philip Roth, Polish
journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, Algeria’s
Assia Djebar and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa. But the coveted Nobel
Prize for literature has eluded Orhan Pamuk – until now.

On Thursday, Turkey’s leading novelist finally got the award, making
him the first Nobel literature laureate from the Middle East – if one
considers Turkey to be a part of the region, and this newspaper does
– since the late Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, who won in 1988. (Israel’s
Shmuel Yosef Agnon split the Nobel with German poet and playwright
Nelly Sachs in 1966. No Turkish writer has ever been honored in the
prize’s 105-year history).

Making the announcement at mid-day on Thursday, the Swedish Academy
in Stockholm – charged with doling out the award and its attendant
check for $1.36 million – praised Pamuk for discovering "in the quest
for the melancholic soul of his native city … new symbols for the
clash and interlacing of cultures."

Pamuk has published one memoir – "Istanbul: Memories and the City" –
and nine novels, five of which have been translated into English.
Overall, his work has earned widespread critical acclaim and
international recognition while finding its way into print in some 40
different languages.

That said, with the exception of a pirated translation from Syria of
his first novel "Cavdet Bey," his work is not widely available in
Arabic, and Pamuk himself has reportedly made a few disparaging
remarks in the past about there being little need for such
translations as so few Arabic speakers read novels.

However, outside literary circles and those who do, whatever the
language, read novels, Pamuk is best known as the famous writer who
went on trial in Turkey. In February 2005, he gave an interview to
the Swiss publication Das Magazin, in which he declared: "Thirty
thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and
nobody but me dares to talk about it." For that statement, a
prosecutor named Turgay Evsen charged Pamuk with violating Article
301 of Turkey’s controversial penal code, which prohibits public
denigration of Turkish national identity, the republic or the
national assembly.

In December 2005, Pamuk’s trial stalled as soon as it started. The
presiding judge, Metin Aydin, postponed the proceedings for two
months on a technicality and eventually the entire case was dropped.
Though he is known for his reclusive and introverted work ethic,
Pamuk never ceases to speak out in defense of free speech and on
behalf of lesser-known colleagues who, without the benefit of kicking
up an international storm of ultra-nationalist protestors on one side
and lemon-faced European Union observers on the other, have been or
are being brought up on the same charges, particularly the
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Another Turkish novelist,
Elif Shafak, went on trial for violating Article 301 last month. Her
case, dropped for lack of evidence, had the rare distinction of being
based entirely on the words Shafak put into the mouths of fictional
characters in her novel "The Bastard of Istanbul."

Beyond his ability to puncture the often tough tissue of
sociopolitical taboo, Pamuk is arguably unrivaled in his ability to
capture the complexities of the Turkish psyche and, more broadly, the
disappointments and depravations of those living in the developing –
but not yet embraced as developed – world.

Pamuk is a brilliant literary stylist. He coils one story into
another and then another, all in the space of a single page, often
even a single paragraph. He crafts his novels into compelling,
blood-rushing narratives of pursuit – his books are essentially
detective stories shot-through with post-modern twists, turns,
doubling backs and returns.

"Snow," his most recent novel to appear in English, follows the poet
Ka to the remote Turkish city of Kars, where he is to report an
investigative feature for a newspaper on a rash of suicides by
so-called "headscarf girls." Really, though, he has traveled to this
foreboding corner of the country to find his first love, Ipek. Just
as he sits down with her in a cafe, a man one table over is shot to
death in the chest, a victim of political assassination.

Yet the core of "Snow" is filled with a certain melancholy
characteristic of all Pamuk’s work. The poet Ka – secular, Western –
wonders why people are growing so religious. He strains to understand
but at the same time seems to seek an alternative source of
spirituality – inseparable from the creativity of his craft – to
either fill the gap of godlessness or protect him from the impulse to
give up and go religious himself. (Pamuk, who was born to an elite
family in Istanbul, has said in the past that members of his social
class regard religion as the reserve of the poor and provincial).

Yet Pamuk’s take on class division betrays no arrogance. Rather, it
is part of a more mournful attempt to document and probe what is too
often reduced to a clash of civilizations. In 2001, Pamuk penned one
of the most cogent responses ever committed in print to the ways in
which the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the dynamic of
global politics.

"The Western world is scarcely aware of [the] overwhelming feeling of
humiliation that is experienced by most of the world’s population,"
he wrote in The New York Review of Books. "This is the grim, troubled
private sphere that neither magical realistic novels that endow
poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular
travel literature manages to fathom. And it is while living within
this private sphere that most people in the world today are afflicted
by spiritual misery.

"The problem facing the West is not only to discover which terrorist
is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of
which city, but also to understand the poor and scorned and
‘wrongful’ majority that does not belong to the West."

Pamuk’s strength as a writer lies in his skill for channeling such
concerns into fiction and then going one step further by inscribing
them onto the surface of the city he loves most. Mid-way through his
masterful novel "The Black Book," Pamuk’s only work of fiction set
wholly in Istanbul, the protagonist Galip, who is searching for his
missing wife and her half-brother, whom he suspects may be together,
remarks: "While it was possible to perceive the city’s old age, its
misfortune, its lost splendor, its sorrow and pathos in the faces of
the citizens, it was not the symptom of a specifically contrived
secret but of a collective defeat, history, and complicity." – With
agencies

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress