UNDER FIRE, BUT STAYING TRUE TO ART
Joy E. Stocke
Philadelphia Inquirer, PA
Oct 15 2006
Thursday, it was announced that Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk had won
the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. When I interviewed Pamuk on the
Columbia University Campus last year, rumors were circulating that
he had been short-listed for the Nobel. But he was already focused
on his new memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, which was still
in galleys.
The day before, an advance copy of Istanbul had helped me stay awake
for the 11-hour flight home from that city. We’d originally been
scheduled to meet at his flat overlooking the Bosphorus. But before I
was to leave for Istanbul, Pamuk phoned. He spoke beautiful English,
with an accent inflected with the rhythm of an upper-class Turkish
background.
"I have left Turkey for personal reasons," he said. But something
in his voice made me doubt those words. Pamuk is a lightning rod in
Turkey, writing candidly about ethnicity, race, and Ottoman history,
subjects that have long been considered taboo. I was, and still am,
thrilled by his work. I am often transported by his dark sense of
humor, and unflinching eye in the face of political and cultural
truths.
In February 2005, Pamuk had spoken to a Swiss journalist, expressing
his opinion that during the final years of the Ottoman Empire,
100,000 Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in an effort to rid the
empire of its Armenian population, addressing what might be the most
sensitive subject in Turkey, the charge that the first genocide of the
20th century took place there. Even as Turkey works toward acceptance
into the European Union, the government has vehemently denied charges
of genocide. (Last week, when France passed a law against denial of
the Armenian genocide, it touched off demonstrations in both France
and Turkey.)
Pamuk told me that when he spoke to that Swiss journalist, he had
asked that his remarks remain off the record. They were printed.
Death threats came thick and fast. Eventually Pamuk was charged with
crimes against Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. His crime:
insulting Turkishness. If he were proven guilty, he would be sentenced
to prison. (Charges were dropped on Jan. 22.) At the urging of friends,
he sought refuge in New York City.
Something stays in my mind about the day we finally met in a large
ballroom with a piano on one end, a table and two chairs at the
other. The man accused of crimes against the state sat down at the
piano and played. As music filled the cavernous room, his actions
made it clear that our interview was to concern art.
"My all-consuming passion," he said, "is to write the very best books
I am capable of writing." He spoke about his new memoir.
"First of all, I did not intend to write a book about Istanbul,"
he said. "As my agent was shopping around my novel Snow, I said,
‘I have so many articles about Istanbul, let’s put them together and
sell that book, too.’
"Publishers were enthusiastic," he said, "And I thought, ‘I can’t
give these guys who are so honest and strong in their support a mere
collection of articles. I will give them a new book.’ I stopped
everything on my current novel, The Museum of Innocence, which is
more ambitious than anything else I’ve written. I thought I would
write the memoir in sixth months. It took a year. I worked 12 hours
a day, just reading and working. My life, because of so many things,
was in a crisis. But every day I would wake up and have a cold shower
and sit down and remember and write."
Opening a notebook filled with dense handwriting, he added, "A writer
is nothing if he cannot be true to his work."
I’m reminded of the first sentence of one of Pamuk’s less-known novels,
The New Life, a sentence that sums up what Pamuk’s work has meant to
so many: "I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed."
For the full text of Joy E. Stocke’s interview with Orhan Pamuk,
see