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View from Istanbul’s fault line
Other Colours
No other Turkish novelist has approached the international acclaim that Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel laureate, has achieved. While his fame has brought him a global community of readers, it has also dragged him into the political arena, bringing controversy and political persecution at home (for comments he made in an interview about the Armenian genocide) and imposing the duty to speak for the nation abroad. This autobiographical collection includes personal reminiscences, a short story, literary analyses, political commentary and his Nobel acceptance speech. Many essays provide a lyrical glimpse into the intimacies of the writer’s life. Modestly quotidian but elusive moments, from the happiness of sharing a carriage ride with his small daughter to the uncanny sense of inanimate objects having intense affections in the insomniac small hours, are beautifully evoked.
This is a grave omission although, given Anglophone cultural insularity, it is unsurprising, and takes us to the crux of the controversies that surround him at home. Global acclaim has resulted in the accusation that Pamuk writes for an international rather than a domestic audience, a resentment arising out of a sense of cultural denigration by the West which pervades much Turkish literature. Many essays engage with questions of the novelist’s imagined audience and political responsibilities. In an essay on Mario Vargas Llosa, he describes the Third World writer’s predicament, where exile is “not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state... of being a perpetual foreigner”. Although his work has ventured beyond it, most notably on a hallucinatory road-trip across Turkey in The New Life and To Kars in Snow, Istanbul and the ghosts of that city are the wellspring of his inspiration. In his observations on barbers, street food and family holidays, Pamuk interweaves personal reminiscence and social history, a strategy he employed so engagingly in Istanbul, shifting from a historical perspective to moments of autobiographical complicity. It is this devotion to the city and its frailties and decay that marks him out as a Romantic writer as much as a postmodern one: “The city’s collective memory is its soul, and its ruins are its most eloquent testimony”. Turkey rests uneasily on geographical and cultural fault lines, and Pamuk returns in many essays to the natural and political disasters, the earthquakes and cultural clashes that distract and inspire the writer. The East-West question has always haunted him, both because of the Turkish Republic’s history and because the novel is a quintessentially European form. Yet, as he points out, many of its greatest exponents are, like Dostoyevsky, not European. Pamuk’s allegiances are to universal human rights and freedom of expression, not to East or West. While these Enlightenment ideals emerged out of European culture, he condemns the West for its hypocrisy, bombing countries in the name of democracy. The Turkish intellectual in Istanbul, that non-European European city, “depends on the ideal of the West, rather than on the West itself”. This collection confirms Pamuk’s status as writer with global stature but a profoundly and particularly Turkish perspective. — By arrangement with The Independent
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Literature is not only a vocation; it is a drug. Pamuk can’t live without his “daily fix” of reading or writing. The imaginary landscapes of the novel are as important as real places, and Pamuk reveals his elective affinities with, among others, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard, Sterne and Stendhal. At times his literary essays provide a fascinating glimpse into the genealogy of his distinctive style; at others he offers up more general introductions to an author’s work. Regrettably, his essays on Turkish writers including Aziz Nesin, Yasar Kemal and Tanpinar are not included here.
