A LITERARY IMPROVISATION ORHAN PAMUK’S ESSAYS COVER MUCH GROUND
By Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
Montreal Gazette
Sep 22, 2007
Canada
Orhan Pamuk displays a playful imagination and wide-ranging
intelligence.
JEAN-PAUL PELISSIER REUTERS Knopf Canada, 448 pages, $34.95
Next month, the winner of the 2007
Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced, and chances are good,
if history is any judge, that the choice will be a puzzling one. After
all, the first winner, in 1901, was Sully Prudhomme – remember him? –
instead of Leo Tolstoy.
The list of overlooked writers has been long and illustrious. It
includes James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and, more recently,
Doris Lessing and Philip Roth.
Sometimes, though, the Nobel committee gets it right.
And last year’s selection of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk is a case
in point.
Even with the Nobel, and two recent bestselling novels to his credit –
The Story of Red and Snow – Pamuk isn’t exactly a household name, at
least not in North America. Which is why his new book, Other Colors:
Essays and a Story, provides a welcome introduction to Pamuk’s playful
imagination and wide-ranging intelligence.
Pamuk has tried to impose some order on Other Colors, dividing
the book into sections on politics, literature, art and personal
vignettes. But this compilation of musings, interviews, lectures and
flights of fancy works best as a kind of literary improvisation.
One of Pamuk’s favourite novels is Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne’s
19th-century masterpiece of digression. "A book about anything,"
is how Pamuk describes it. Other Colors is a book about anything
and everything.
Indeed, he makes room for everything he’s been unable to fit into his
fiction. There are chapters on barbershops and censorship, Elizabeth
Taylor and Albert Camus, eating hot dogs on the streets of Istanbul
and the reaction to 9/11 on those same streets.
Pamuk’s talent as a novelist and, here, as an essayist is in taking two
unlikely subjects or styles and connecting them. So a grim chapter
about a devastating earthquake in Turkey also becomes a grimly
funny and insightful look at the human race’s unlimited capacity
for rationalization:
"(W)e have decided that there is only one way to shake off that sense
of impending disaster afflicting all earthquake survivors: go back
to the scientists and professors who have warned us that Istanbul is
soon to suffer a great earthquake and make them reconsider."
Other Colors is also an autobiography disguised as a scrapbook. Piece
together the various parts and what you have is the portrait of a
life in literature.
Being a writer in Turkey hasn’t been easy. The publication of Pamuk’s
first novel was delayed when there was a military coup in his country;
his most recent novel, Snow, made him enemies both among political
Islamists and secularists.
In 2005, he was also charged with having "publicly denigrated Turkish
identity." The case
didn’t go to trial, but if it had, Pamuk could have been sentenced
to three years in prison. His crime: telling a Swiss newspaper that,
yes, Turkey needed to own up to its role in the 1915 Armenian genocide.
For all the trouble literature has gotten him into, Pamuk maintains it
is his medicine. His relationship with books is passionate, and his
essays here on the writers he admires transcend criticism. They are
personal and profound, intellectual fan letters. He loves Dostoyevsky,
for instance, for his tormented soul. But then what drove Dostoyevsky
is not very different from what drives Pamuk: "the jealousy, anger,
and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European."
Being a Turkish novelist trapped between tradition and modernity,
between mistrust of and affection for the West, is one of the recurring
themes in this book. So is Pamuk’s wholehearted faith that literature
has the capacity to unite us all.
According to Pamuk, novels are still better suited than anything
else at reminding us of a simple but regularly forgotten fact – that
"all people resemble one another." It’s a lesson too often overlooked.
But if Pamuk’s dreams for literature are big in Other Colors, his
notion of himself as a literary man is much more pragmatic. There’s
nothing particularly romantic about writing novels, he says, adding
that it’s like "digging a well with a needle."
Mainly, though, it’s a selfish love of what he does that has kept
Pamuk going. In his 2006 Nobel lecture, the essay that fittingly
concludes Other Colors, Pamuk makes a simple, convincing confession:
"I write because I never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."
Joel Yanofsky is a Montreal writer.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress