Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, and one might think that his collected writings could not fail to be of unbroken interest. This is not quite true, but his new book “Other Colors: Essays and a Story” is, for the most part, a fascinating glimpse into his Turkey, and Turkishness, the sources of his novels and his ideas about literature.
Pamuk has a conflicted relationship with his home country. After all, he has faced trial on charges that, by alluding in an interview to the Turkish murder of Armenians, he “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The charges were dropped, but others, who did not have Pamuk’s fame and good fortune, lie in prison on similar charges. Pamuk writes in detail about the threats to freedom in Turkey, the suspicion of intellectuals and the difficulties of the artist, in a land populated by “religious conservatives, traditionalists, nationalists who cannot take a joke, and joyless Jacobeans.”
Yet he declares that he cannot imagine living anywhere other than Istanbul. His reflective essays on that city, its ferries, even its hamburger stands, are full of love, touched with regret for its growing similarity to everywhere else. The account of the terrible earthquake of 1999 is complex, as most of his writing is; it mixes grief for the dead and displaced, anger against the shoddy contractors and bribed inspectors, and worry about the future of his beloved city.
Turkey is at the juncture of Europe and Asia; Pamuk is ideally placed to comment on what he calls “the East-West question,” including the Turkish application to join the European Community and its delays and obstructions by other members and typical Turkish attitudes toward Europe:
“If a European saw this, what would he think?” This is both a fear and a desire. We are all afraid that when they see how we do not resemble them, they will castigate us. This is why we want there to be less torture in prisons, or at least torture that leaves no trace. Sometimes we want to take pleasure in showing them just how different we are from them: as when we want to meet an Islamist terrorist, or when we want the first person to shoot the Pope to be a Turk.”
His lighter essays, on topics like wristwatches, dogs and his daughter, are negligible. When we learn that they appeared in a humor magazine we may find ourselves, once more, pondering the gulf between East and West.
The best parts of this book, by far, are Pamuk’s comments on fiction. He is like Kafka; he could say, “I am made of literature.” In his introduction to a Turkish translation of “Tristram Shandy,” he insists that the reader of that novel (and, by inference, any great novel that is “hard to read”) feels uneasy; but behind the uneasiness “there is the knowledge that great literature is what gives man his understanding of his place in the scheme of things, and so, reminding himself that writing is one of the deepest and most wondrously strange of human activities, he picks up the book again in a moment of solitude.”
The author comments modestly on his own work, saving his generous and contagious admiration for writers like Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Camus, but you feel the nobility of his vocation when he writes that “All great novels open your eyes to things you already knew but could not accept, simply because no great novel had yet opened your eyes to them.”
Merritt Moseley teaches literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
NONFICTION
Other Colors
Essays and a Story
By Orhan Pamuk
$26.95
