An evening with pamuk by sunil sethi
business standard
8th march 2009

Mumbai: Two foreign women hover in animated excitement at the entrance
to the busy restaurant and hurry over to the table with looks that
say, `How did he get here before us?’ They are Turkish, and have just
spotted the best-known, certainly the most widely read writer Turkey
has produced, the country’s first and only Nobel prize winner. Orhan
Pamuk is charmed but not surprised; India has long been on his radar,
a fascination he shares with many of his compatriots.

It is his second visit, and he has lingered awhile in Goa, soaking up
the landscape, looking at old churches, and reconsidering the
development of the miniaturists’ art in the 16th and 17th
centuries-the subject of his most famous novel, My Name Is Red
(2000). `It is from the Portuguese in Goa that Indian miniature
painters learnt perspective. And when the demand for miniatures dried
up in Turkey it is to Akbar’s court, where it flourished, that Turkish
artists migrated.’

My Name Is Red is much more than a disquisition on the meanings of
art=80’a reflection on orthodoxy versus innovation, authenticity
versus falsification-and it aptly sums up the life of a writer who
originally

wanted to be a painter but fulfilled his quest in words and
actions. Pamuk, who is 57 this year, is an easily approachable man,
expansive, quick-witted, allusive and argumentative. Asked in Mumbai
if his thinly-veiled, and often plainly candid, portraits of his
family ever got him into trouble, he cheerfully replied, `And talking
about them at press conferences gets me into more trouble.’

Orhan Pamuk, the quintessential liberal, born into the educated
cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of Istanbul, a city at the cusp of Europe and
Asia, beset by the ghosts of the Ottoman empire and the reforms of
Atatürk, is a man

engaged in the battle between modernity and tradition, between
pro-Europe secularists and diehard nationalists. For his frank,
free-thinking opinion he has been targeted by both sides, not to speak
of Islamic fundamentalists who loathe him the most.

Three years ago, in an interview to a Swiss newspaper, Pamuk brought
up the injustices of the past and present-a million Armenians killed
in the closing decade of the Ottoman empire and 30,000 Kurds by modern
Turkish forces-and all hell broke loose.

Criminal charges were brought against him under a clause of the penal
code that orders imprisonment for insulting and denigrating the
Turkish republic. In the outcry that erupted at home and abroad, Pamuk
stood his ground:

`I repeat, I said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000
Kurds were killed in Turkey.’ Support from intellectuals worldwide, in
defence of freedom of speech, prevented Pamuk from going to jail. But
his friend, journalist Hrant Dink, of Armenian descent, was imprisoned
and later shot dead.

Pamuk realises that his fame as a writer is a buffer against direct
attack (`They don’t use that law against authors, they use it against
political activists and fundamentalists’) but he is gripped by the
ambiguities of history, identity and memory. It is painfully clear in
the brutal conflicts of the most overtly political of his novels, Snow
(2004). But the quest to evoke the past, in the melancholy-drenched
Arabic word huzun, is as painfully prevalent in his non-fiction homage
to his city Istanbul, perhaps the most widely read of his books. What
starts as a memoir of family life, becomes by stages, a study of
Istanbul’s buildings, its seasons and history, brought to life through
the characters who inhabit it as much as through the eyes of foreign
visitors.

But Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, The Museum of Innocence, a runaway
success in his own country and out in an English translation later
this year,

sounds like none of his other works. It is a love story, he says,
about a love between two people as obsessive as a person’s love for
beautiful objects in a museum. Like the multiple narrators of My Name
Is Red, who are animate and inanimate, Pamuk’s art is an ongoing
reflection of life viewed through a succession of mirrors.