ORHAN PAMUK PUTS TANPINAR’S TALE OF TWO CONTINENTS BACK ON THE MAP
Maya Jaggi

guardian.co.uk
Tuesday December 1 2009

Sixty years after it was first published, the "Turkish Ulysses"
finally gets its due, thanks to a literary festival and museum set
up in its honour

Twenty-four hours in Istanbul … the setting for Tanpinar’s ‘Turkish
Ulysses’. Photograph: Carson Ganci/Corbis

Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel literature laureate, is preparing to
open a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul next summer, and the city has
already seen a ripple effect from his prize. I sailed up a storm-hit
Bosphorus with writers from 30 countries during the inaugural Istanbul
Tanpinar literary festival in November. Run by Nermin Mollaoglu of
the dynamic literary agency Kalem, and coinciding with Istanbul’s
book fair, this is the city’s first international writers’ festival,
and aims to feed a growing interest abroad in writing from Turkey. It
is named after a dead Turkish novelist and poet whose resuscitated
reputation owes much to Pamuk’s praise.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar described this as the "city of two continents"
in his modernist masterpiece A Mind at Peace. Published 60 years ago
– and only last year in an English translation from Erdag Goknar by
Archipelago Books – the novel unfolds over 24 hours on the eve of the
second world war, and has been tagged as the "Turkish Ulysses". Pamuk,
himself no mean chronicler of his home town, regards it as the
"greatest novel ever written about Istanbul".

So why is Tanpinar, who died in 1962, so little known? The short story
writer Ciler Ilhan told me he was "despised for years by writers who
believed only in the Turkish republic. He was seen as old-fashioned
– but he’s groundbreaking." Born in 1901 and steeped in the Ottoman
culture on which Kemal Ataturk’s republic of 1923 turned its back,
Tanpinar wrote a satire, The Time Regulation Institute (1961),
about a man striving to adapt to westward-looking "modernisation". He
ignored the 1928 drive to purge Turkish of Arabic and Persian – some
two-thirds of the Ottoman dictionary. Another writer, Ayfer Tunc,
believes this richness of style has contributed to an "ironic and
deplorable" ignorance of his genius among young Turkish readers.

The new annual festival may help change that. Largely reliant on
private sponsorship, it was launched in style in the Ciragan Palace,
once home to the Ottoman sultans, and now part of a luxury hotel on
the Bosphorus. Cosier venues ranged from bookshops and cafes along
the main shopping drag of Istiklal Caddesi, to the subterranean
Byzantine Basilica Cistern, near the great cathedral-turned-mosque
of Aghia Sophia. The festival was also a terminus for Word Express,
an ambitious project in south-east Europe backed by the Wales-based
Literature Across Frontiers. This brought 23 young writers on train
journeys through the Balkans from Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sarajevo,
in a move to relink areas sundered by politics and bloodshed.

Turkish writers are among those with a keen eye on history. A recent
novel by Can Eryumlu, Teardrops of Chios, looks back to Ottoman
massacres against Greeks on the Aegean island of Chios in the 1820s.

"Turks are amnesiac", says Eryumlu, who feels they were also encouraged
to forget that "we all have different ancestors", in order to forge
a unified state from a defeated empire after the first world war. He
spent time on the Greek island to research the novel, and sees it
as important to tackle topics that remain raw: "If Greeks say it,
Turks say it’s a lie. The only way is for a Turk to say it."

Some writers sense an opening up of the past. "It’s becoming easier
to talk about history," says Yigit Bengi, a young fiction writer for
whom Turkish nationalism is "officially created, and does not have
deep roots". His stories draw on a more ancient and layered history,
including Roman and Byzantine, and he is writing a novel about the
role of Turks in the Crusades, when they were "used as slave soldiers
on both sides – Christian and Muslim". Bengi was among 200 Turkish
writers and academics who issued an internet apology a year ago for
the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915.

Fethiye Cetin’s 2004 memoir My Grandmother (translated by Maureen
Freely in 2008), about her discovery that her beloved grandmother
was an Armenian Christian but had been adopted by a Turkish military
officer after the massacres and forced to deny her origins, was
a bestseller in Turkey. She was the lawyer of Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrank Dink, assassinated in 2007. For Cetin, whom I met
last year, the "only way to overcome the trauma of the past is to
talk; being silent destroys everybody". Her new book, Grandchildren,
consists of interviews with 25 other people who have also discovered
an Armenian grandparent, and whose family experience challenges an
official culture of denial.

Tanpinar’s Notebooks furnish an epigraph for Pamuk’s first novel
since his Nobel, The Museum of Innocence, which will be out in the
UK in January in Maureen Freely’s superb translation. It contains a
locator map for his museum, and a free entrance ticket. The actual
museum, in an Ottoman-style house along a stretch of antique shops
in hilly Cukurcuma, will hold Istanbul ephemera that Pamuk gathered
for inspiration while writing his Proustian (or Tanpinesque) epic of
lost love. I had a preview of the collection when the novel came out
in Turkish, in Pamuk’s nearby office apartment overlooking Cihangir
mosque and the stretch of water where the Golden Horn inlet meets
the Bosphorus. He told me his "museum of the everyday", which holds
everything from ferry tickets and women’s hair clips to a quince
grinder, would have a display for each of the novel’s 83 chapters. In a
conceit that might have pleased Tanpinar – as well as writers gathered
in his name – the mundane memorabilia are "vessels of a lost past".