A Quick Guide to Orhan Pamuk – Armenian Directory & News

Newsweek
Oct 6 2006

A Quick Guide to Orhan Pamuk
(So when they announce that he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature
next week, you’ll be totally up to speed).

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Owen Matthews and Malcolm Jones
Newsweek
Updated: 4:53 p.m. ET Oct. 6, 2006

Oct. 6, 2006 – Once again, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is rumored to
be a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The author
of "Snow" and "My Name Is Red" has been here before, along with
Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, the writers most frequently
mentioned as his competition. But this looks like the 54-year-old
Pamuk’s year (a bad year for a writer can be good for his Nobel
chances-see below).

In the interest of dispelling any Orhan Who? confusion, we’re
providing a crib sheet. So by the time the Nobel committee makes its
announcement Oct. 12, you’ll be up to speed. Of course, the more we
say and the more you prepare, the worse his chances will probably
get. On the other hand, he’s someone you should know about whether he
ever wins the prize or not. He’s that good.

Who is Orhan Pamuk?

Pamuk is Turkey’s greatest novelist-and its most controversial. Last
year he sparked a furor when he told a Swiss newspaper that "a
million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country
[during World War I and between 1986 and 1999, respectively], and I’m
the only one who dares to talk about it." In response,
ultranationalist Turkish lawyers brought charges against Pamuk,
accusing him of "insulting Turkishness." The charges could have
landed him in jail if the case hadn’t been thrown out. Even so, Pamuk
received multiple death threats and was branded an "abject creature"
by Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper. In the process, though, he
became an international hero of free speech. The European Union’s
enlargement commissioner called Pamuk’s trial a "litmus test" of
Turkey’s commitment to the European values, and some of the world’s
top authors, including Gabriel García Marquez, Gunter Grass, Umberto
Eco and John Updike publicly backed his stand.

One of Pamuk’s most enduring themes is the tension between the values
of East and West. "Snow" (2002), his latest novel, is set in a
snowbound city on the edges of contemporary Turkey-and, symbolically,
on the margins of Western civilization. Its protagonist, a poet,
finds himself caught in a web of conflicting ideologies, from
religious extremism to totalitarianism-all the -isms that have
stalked the Turkish Republic since it first emerged as a secularized,
Westernized state out of the ruins of the Ottoman past a century ago.

"Snow" takes place in the 1990s in the actual Turkish city of Kars,
but while the story, packed with nationalists, socialists and
militant Islamists, has a superficial currency, its reality is
dreamlike. Snow falls for most of the novel, isolating the town,
where a poet, called Ka, has come to investigate a series of suicides
by teenage Muslim girls who refuse the secular government’s order to
remove their headscarves. Artistically blocked for years, Ka, a
Westernized sophisticate, suddenly begins to write poetry again. He
falls in love so deeply that he begins to betray everything-even his
own scruples-to preserve his happiness. Because he believes in
nothing beyond his own desire, he is marked for tragedy.

In "Istanbul" (2005), which is both an autobiography and a brilliant
portrait of modern Turkey, Pamuk uses his native city-which is
located literally on the geographical dividing line between the
Christian West and the Muslim East-as a metaphor for a culture that
wants to look forward but can’t help simultaneously looking
backward-with melancholy and a terrific sense of loss-at the glories
of its past civilization. It is also a very sensual, almost
street-by-street celebration of a very real place. Few writers mix
ideas with the grittiness of the real world better than Pamuk, who
has always identified with the outsider, the observer, the recording
angel: the "imaginative exploration of the other, the enemy who
resides in all our minds" is a novelist’s most important function, he
says.

What’s his writing like?
Here’s a sample, from "Istanbul":

To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish
of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters
to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has
a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained
submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty
that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation
that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. To see the city in
black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the
melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you
need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the
crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will
be wearing the same, pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of
my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens and oranges of their
rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have
done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not-but there
is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you
dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how
you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and
fifty years.

–Boundary_(ID_xIuiyQJgsxriZ0kes4L2wQ)–
From: Baghdasarian