ORHAN PAMUK AND THE IDEA OF THE NOVELIST

The Times
March 19, 2008
UK

Orhan Pamuk and the idea of the novelist

In his new book, the Nobel Laureate has revealed more about himself
than he intendedChristopher de Bellaigue.

In 1988, a little-known writer called Orhan Pamuk was struggling
to complete The Black Book, his fourth and most ambitious novel to
date. "As the writing progressed", Pamuk remembers in Other Colours,
his new collection of essays and stories, "and the book grew broader,
the pleasure of writing it grew deeper." This was small consolation,
for "the novel refused to end". Pamuk found himself alone with his
obsession, unshaven and slovenly, "clutching a mangled plastic bag
and wearing a cap, a raincoat that was missing a few buttons, and
ancient gym shoes with rotting soles. I’d go into any old restaurant
or lunch counter and wolf down my food, casting hostile looks about
me". He bore, he writes, an "air of ruination". Put that Orhan Pamuk,
the squinting nonentity his disapproving mother always predicted he
would become, alongside the accomplished literary figure we recognize
today, and you get an idea of his achievement. Born into a culture
unsure of itself and lacking creative invention, suffocating in the
"small literary world" of insecure, distrustful republican Turkey,
the young Pamuk was bold enough to try his hand at a foreign art
form that few Turks had adopted with much success. And the rest –
the best-selling novels, a highly regarded memoir, Istanbul, and the
2006 Nobel Prize for Literature – hardly needs elaboration.

In Istanbul, an exploration of Pamuk’s relationship with the city that
inspired him, and now in Other Colours, Pamuk gives us an insight,
in the prime of his writing life, into the way he sees himself and
would like others to see him. The essays here, which range from
autobiographical vignettes and sketches to literary criticism and
journalism, reinforce three formative images, first impressed on
the pages of Istanbul: Pamuk’s charming, rakish father, forgiven
his absenteeism because he encouraged his son to follow his heart
and write; the city of Istanbul and the fascination it exerts; and
finally those dead novelists with whom, even in youth, Pamuk formed
a precocious brotherhood.

Although he has expressed himself on politics and history – most
famously in 2005, when he observed that many Armenians and Kurds
had been killed in Turkey, for which unremarkable statement he was
unsuccessfully prosecuted on charges of "insulting Turkishness" –
Pamuk is an introspective writer. Indeed, it might be said that the
sum of his novels constitutes one of the most sustained, if elliptical,
autobiographies in literature. His Nobel acceptance speech, reprinted
here, is whispered and personal, a striking contrast to the genial
broadside that Doris Lessing delivered last December. And when he
writes of the authors who influenced him, summoning the reverence he
felt for them as a young man, it is not so much Dostoevsky, Stendhal,
Camus and Nabokov that we see as Orhan Pamuk reading Dostoevsky,
Stendhal, Camus and Nabokov.

Of these, Dostoevsky is the most important, and this surely has
much to do with what Pamuk sees as the Russian’s "familiarity
with European thought and his anger against it, his equal and
opposite desires to belong to Europe and to shun it". The Turkish
Republic that Kemal Ataturk set up in the 1920s has never settled the
question of its political and cultural status in relation to Europe,
and Pamuk has devoted himself to examining the tensions, between
faith and rationalism, and between the parochial and the worldly,
that have flowed from this omission. When he writes that Dostoevsky
"hated seeing Russian intellectuals seize upon an idea just arrived
from Europe and believe themselves privy to all the secrets of
the world", one is reminded of Pamuk’s disdain for the Kemalists’
similarly uncritical reception of European ideas. These ideas, it
may be assumed, found a literary voice among those "half-witted,
mediocre, moderately successful, bald, male, degenerate writers"
whose masterpieces, amusingly slighted in a chapter called "How I
got rid of some of my books", Pamuk takes much pleasure in throwing
away. Unlike Dostoevsky, Pamuk has never been directly involved,
at least not in a sustained way, with the politics of his country,
and it is easy to see why. Subtly contemptuous of the Kemalists, he
is no more inclined towards those pious patriots – analogous to the
Slavophils of nineteenth-century Russia – who recall with nostalgia
the Ottoman Empire and its presiding certainties, the greatness of the
Turk and the glory of God. Political agnosticism, and a wide-ranging
literary gaze, have made Pamuk a loner in his native land. If he has
peers, they are younger Turkish writers – Perihan Magden is one –
who write thoughtful novels in modern, inventive Turkish, and whose
complaint about Kemalism is not that it is too Western, but not Western
enough; in effect, that it doesn’t trust democracy or pluralism.

Perhaps inevitably for a book that has been put together from diverse
sources, Other Colours is patchy and uneven. The writing on Istanbul,
including chapters on fast food, Bosphorus ferries and earthquakes,
is never less than diverting, but some good sections from the Turkish
original, including an appreciation of the neglected Turkish writer
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, have been omitted, apparently for no better
reason than to avoid alienating the Western reader. They have been
replaced by obvious crowd pleasers such as a section, called "Views
from the Capital of the World", about New York. Pamuk is a better
novelist than essayist. In a ponderous description of the effect that
the Brothers Karamazov had on him as a boy, for instance, he takes
a page to say what the arresting first line of his novel, the New
Life, says in a sentence: "I read a book one day and my whole life
was changed". These infelicities are not lessened by Maureen Freely’s
rather flat translation.

Brighter spots include a short story called "To Look Out the
Window". In this melancholy gem, Pamuk evokes the pre-adolescent
listlessness he felt and the adult regret he observed while growing
up, the scion of an affluent Istanbul family, in the 1950s. Other
Colours also includes three fine speeches that he wrote for foreign
audiences. In one, he describes the deadening effects his trial
had on his creativity. In the second, he justifies his political
abstinence in a country of passionate politics, his desire to "aspire
to nothing but to write beautiful novels", and his distrust of strong
opinions, because "most of us entertain contradictory thoughts
simultaneously". The last chapter here, Pamuk’s Nobel acceptance
speech, starts with a tribute to his father and ends up listing the
reasons why he writes – as contradictory and human, and as full of
altruism and egoism, as the author himself.

In Other Colours, Pamuk has revealed more about himself than he
intended.

His situating himself so close to the likes of Dostoevsky and
Nabokov strikes a discordant note, at once aspirational and
unadventurous. Orhan Pamuk does not, as Christopher Hitchens has
acerbically observed, wear his learning lightly, and this may be
because the process of acquiring it was a trying one, pitting him
against the tepid philistinism of 1970s Istanbul and his mother’s
displeasure. Other Colours shows him to be a solitary, determined
autodidact, prone to self-indulgence and morbidity; it contains only
hints of his greatness as a novelist.

Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of In the Rose Garden of the
Marytyrs: A memoir of Iran, 2005, and, most recently, The Struggle for
Iran, 2007. He is the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College,
Cambridge.