The Globe and Mail
BELLE LETTRES

Pamuk: prophet or poseur?
CLAIRE BERLINSKI
December 22, 2007

OTHER COLORS
Essays and a Story
By Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Maureen Freely
Knopf Canada, 433 pages, $34.95

The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most celebrated and controversial
man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His
novels Snow and My Name is Red are widely considered world-class
achievements. The themes of Pamuk’s oeuvre include the conflict
between the East and the West, the tension between Islam and
modernity, and the intense melancholia of his native
Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, multilayered and
allegorical; detractors find him faddish and incomprehensible.

On Sept. 11, 2001, writers treating the themes of East contra West and
Islam contra modernity hit the literary jackpot. Pamuk – Eastern
enough to write novels about Ottoman calligraphers and Islamic
radicals, Western enough to write them in a postmodern, magic-realist
style – became the darling of the Western literary establishment,
serially winning the most prestigious and lucrative literary awards in
the Western world: the IMPAC Dublin Award, the Peace Prize of the
German Book Trade, the Prix Médicis étranger, the Premio Grinzane
Cavour.

Then, in 2005, Pamuk remarked to a Swiss weekly newsmagazine that
"thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians were killed in these
lands and nobody dares to talk about it." By "these lands" he meant
Turkey. By "nobody," it is not quite clear what he meant; as far as I
can tell – and I live in Turkey myself – nobody here will stop talking
about it. But the sentiment in Turkey, generally speaking, is that the
Armenians had it coming, and quite a few more Kurds want killing.

Pamuk seemed to be suggesting otherwise. The Turkish government
brought criminal charges against him under the infamous Article 301,
which forbids citizens from insulting Turkishness. Pamuk was in one
stroke elevated from symbolist writer to symbol. The European Union’s
Enlargement Commissioner called Pamuk’s case a "litmus test" of
Turkey’s commitment to European values; writers around the world
rightly denounced the charges as an outrage against free
expression. In the end, the case was dropped on a technicality.

Facing death threats at home, Pamuk sensibly decamped for New
York. But his prosecution, combined with his status as ambassador at
large for the westernized Islamic world, functioned like camembert in
a mousetrap to the Nobel committee, which in 2006 awarded him the
Nobel Prize for literature. Pamuk is a talented writer, but no one in
his right mind believes this was an award based on literary merit.

Pamuk has for the past three decades been filling his notebooks with
sketches, half-finished short stories, thoughts about literature and
reflections on the travails of life as a writer and a Turk. He has
compiled them, loosely edited, into Other Colors, "a book made of
ideas, images and fragments of life that have still not found the way
into one of my novels." Although it contains previously published
works, such as his Nobel acceptance speech and the transcripts of
various interviews he has granted over the years, it is mostly
comprised of non-fiction essays written some years ago but only now
seeing the light of day: literary criticism, reminiscences of his
boyhood and particularly of his father, reflections on the challenges
of quitting smoking, a discussion of his wristwatches, two short
meditations on seagulls and their sad fates, ruminations on the pathos
of being a Turk and the Turk’s endless, resentful fascination with
Europe. There are more descriptions of Istanbul in the melancholy vein
of his previous memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City.

But this book is about Pamuk himself, particularly the challenges of
being a great writer and a severe depressive. The collection has been
received with rapture by many critics, who celebrate this offering as
a unique window into Pamuk’s interior life. Indeed, it is precisely
that. Unfortunately, it seems that Pamuk’s interior life is largely
that of a lugubrious poseur.

"In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature," Pamuk
gravely introduces himself. "In this way I am no different from the
patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day." If you didn’t
quite get the point, he repeats it again two sentences later: "For me,
literature is medicine. Like the medicine that others take by spoon or
injection, my daily dose of literature – my daily fix, if you will –
must meet certain standards." If he is forced "to go a long stretch
without his paper-and-ink cure," he feels "misery setting inside me
like cement. My body has difficulty moving, my joints get stiff, my
head turns to stone, my perspiration even seems to smell differently."

Is he serious? Yes, he is. For page upon page, Pamuk stresses in these
self-enamoured tones that he is a man who really likes to read
books. Good ones, too, by famous writers like Dostoyevsky and Borges –
not, you know, easy ones. He’s different from other Turks, you
see. But he’s not like the Europeans, either. He’s an outsider,
eternally apart, rejected by all, accepted by no one (the Nobel
committee aside). Life hurts. A seagull croaks.

There is a fleeting moment of insight when he later remarks that he
wants "to say a few things about my library, but I don’t wish to
praise it in the manner of one who proclaims his love of books only to
let you know how exceptional he is, and how much more cultured and
refined than you." He negates this half-hearted essay at modesty in
the very next sentence: "Still, I live in a country that views the
non-reader as the norm and the reader as somehow defective, so I
cannot but respect the affectations, obsessions and pretensions of the
tiny handful who read and build libraries amid the general tedium and
boorishness."

Sentiments such as these may make the reader suspect that Pamuk was
prosecuted in Turkey not because he spoke the truth about Armenia and
the Kurds but because he is a patronizing pest. But let’s not quibble:
Pamuk needs to read or he will die. That, surely, is the mark of a
particularly excellent reader. And he is, moreover, caught between
East and West, which makes his affliction all the more acute.

Pamuk lived and wrote in Cihangir, a lovely neighbourhood on the
European side of Istanbul. This happens to be where I now live and
write. From Cihangir, if your window faces the Bosphorus, on a clear
day you can see Asia. So I’m caught between East and West myself, not
to mention caught between north and south, and caught, at least twice
a day, between daytime and nighttime. (By the way, you would not know
it from reading Pamuk, but it is usually a clear day here. Istanbul is
a bright, vibrant, cheerful city.) It is physically impossible not to
be caught between East and West, actually. We all are. So may I take
this opportunity to beg Pamuk, everyone who writes about Pamuk, and
indeed, everyone who writes about Istanbul, to retire forever the
phrase "caught between East and West"?

Yes, Istanbul is located geographically between Asia and Europe. Yes,
Turks tend to be rather aware of this. Turkey, as Pamuk observes – and
if you think about it for even a second, it should not come as a
surprise – exhibits both Oriental and Occidental qualities. But this
"caught between East and West" business – how much more literary
mileage does he plan to get out of it? First time: a fair
observation. Thousandth time: 999 times too many. (Next up: New York
is a melting pot; Paris is the City of Lights; there’s nothing in
Texas but steers and queers.)

Even the hamburgers of his youth were, for Pamuk, "like so much else
in Istanbul, a synthesis of East and West." So were the frankfurters,
in fact. And like everything in Istanbul, they made him feel
gloomy. "I would look at myself standing there, eating my hamburger
and drinking my ayran, and see that I was not handsome, and I would
feel alone and guilty and lost in the city’s great crowds."

For this is his ultimate subject: his very sad mood. Forget for a
moment the literary accolades and imagine what it would be like to go
on a date with this melancholy egomaniac. He shows up at the café
wearing a black turtleneck, brandishing his annotated copy of Notes
from Underground, making sure the title faces out. Within minutes he
tells you that, unlike everyone else in Turkey, he reads. "Books are
what keep me going," he says.

"Really? I like books too," you say politely.

"Let me explain what I feel on a day when I’ve not written well, am
unable to lose myself in a book," he adds gravely. "First, the world
changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable."

"Oh," you say. "That sounds very painful."

"I feel as if there is no line between life and death," he
continues. "It’s worse than depression. I want to disappear. I don’t
care if I live or die. Or if the world comes to an end, even. In fact,
if it ended right this minute, so much the better."

It is a bright spring day in Istanbul. He tells you that he hates the
springtime.

Pamuk is a creature of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie, a class of Turks
much given to examining their own misery and alienation and finding
them intensely significant, much in the way the 19th-century romantics
admired their own tuberculosis. The Turkish elite is, as Pamuk is
painfully aware, a parvenu class.

What seems to escape him is that in stressing how much he reads and
the quality of his taste, he does not display his distance from the
social cohort from which he emerged. Rather, he marks himself as its
caricature. Young women from this social class dye their hair purple
and weep a lot. The older women complain of migraines. The young men
are sent by their parents to psychiatrists who trained in the United
States; they wear black trench coats, rarely shave and tell everyone
who will listen that no one in Turkey understands them.

"Time passes," Pamuk scribbles in his notebook. "There’s nothing. It’s
already nighttime. Doom and defeat. … I am hopelessly
miserable. … I could find nothing in these books that remotely
resembled my mounting misery." I suppose sentiments like these are not
uniquely Turkish; teenagers around the world fill their diaries with
this kind of drivel. But usually they read those diaries when they
grow up, cringe, then throw them out along with their old Morrissey
albums.

Mind you, Pamuk is not all gloom; he is immensely cheered by the
thought of his own moral gravity: "A novelist might spend the whole
day playing, but at the same time he carries the deepest conviction of
being more serious than others." He brightens up when he considers his
own accomplishments, too: "Having published seven novels, I can safely
say that, even if it takes some effort, I am reliably able to become
the author who can write the books of my dreams." Sometimes he works,
he tells us, "with the incandescence of a mystic trying to leave his
body."

And did he mention that he really, really likes books? – although I do
have to wonder, occasionally, just how carefully he is reading them;
in his discussion of Nabokov, for example, he describes Humbert
Humbert as a man who "searches for timeless beauty with all the
innocence of a small child." Beg pardon? Humbert searches for timeless
beauty by molesting an innocent small child. There is quite a
difference.

There are, here and there, flashes of the gloomy talent for which he
is rightly admired. Reading the vignette A Seagull Lies Dying on the
Shore, I felt quite bad for the seagull (although I am pleased to
report that those same seagulls, which I see from my window, look
perfectly healthy).

And there is one excellent section, quite chilling for those of us who
live here, about the great earthquake of 1999. Pamuk recalls wondering
whether, come the next big quake, the minarets of the Cihangir mosque
would fall on his roof. I live next door to that very mosque. I had
not thought of that. His comment prompted me to step outside and
contemplate those minarets with a certain unease. Discussing the
aftermath of the earthquake, Pamuk for a brief moment removes his gaze
from the mirror and observes his surroundings with interest and even a
hint of irony: "One rumour had it that the earthquake was the work of
Kurdish separatist guerrillas, another that it was caused by Americans
who were now coming to our aid with a huge military hospital
ship. (‘How do you suppose they made it here so fast?’ the conspiracy
theory went.)" Yes, there at last is an honest line; it will certainly
sound familiar to anyone living in Turkey these days.

But the rest of the book is the kind of thing you can only publish if
you have won a Nobel Prize and feel entirely confident that no matter
what you say, everyone will buy it and the critics will be too afraid
to point out the obvious: Sometimes it is best to keep your interior
life to yourself.

Claire Berlinski is a writer living in Istanbul. She is the author of
Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too, and
Lion Eyes, a novel set in Paris and Istanbul.

Oh so weary

I come home dead tired in the evenings. Looking straight ahead, at the
roads and the pavements. Angry at something, hurt, incensed. Though my
imagination is still conjuring up beautiful images, even these pass
quickly in the film in my head. Time passes. There’s nothing. It’s
already nighttime. Doom and defeat. What’s for supper?…

What’s on television? No, I’m not watching television; it only makes
me angry. I’m very angry. I like meatballs, too – so where are the
meatballs? All of life is here, around this table.

The angels call me to account.

What did you do today, darling?

All my life … I’ve worked. In the evenings, I’ve come home. On
television – but I’m not watching television. I answered the phone a
few times, got angry at a few people; then I worked, wrote. … I
became a man … and also – yes, much obliged – an animal.

What did you do today, darling?

Can’t you see? I’ve got salad in my mouth. My teeth are crumbling in
my jaw. My brain is melting from unhappiness and trickling down my
throat. Where’s the salt, where’s the salt, where’s the salt? We’re
eating our lives away. And a little yogurt, too. The brand called
Life."

From the essay Dead Tired in the Evening, in Other Colors.

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