skygiants | Entries tagged with orhan pamuk

I almost wish I'd waited to read Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City until after I'd actually had a chance to see Istanbul with my own eyes. (SOMEDAY.) But on the other hand, from the context of the book, coming to see Istanbul as a tourist wouldn't make a huge difference; he's writing an intensely personal memoir about growing up in Istanbul, about the relationship between the character of a city and the character of its citizens, and a five-day tour probably couldn't tell me much about that.

According to Orhan Pamuk, the primary character of contemporary Istanbul is hüzün, loosely translated as melancholy - and there's no denying that Istanbul is a very melancholy if very beautifully-written book. I'm not really convinced that the melancholy is all inherent to Istanbul, I think a large part of it is Orhan Pamuk, but the book is not really about separating those two things. Chapters about Pamuk's childhood flow straight into chapters about famous river accidents flow into chapters about Flaubert. Some fascinating discussions about westernization and politics kind of trickle underneath extended musings on architecture. Occasionally you'll get a long and fascinating digression about something so incredibly bizarre you sort of suspect that Pamuk is playing mind games with you, as he does in his novels. I'm still not entirely sure that the lovingly-detailed chapter on Resat Ekram Kocu - author of an epic unfinished fifteen-volume Istanbul Encyclopedia apparently filled with a wide-ranging array of entries grotesque and historical on subjects ranging from unique forms of execution to attractive boys that he happened to meet in the street that day, all of which peters off around the letter G - is not just a huge practical joke on the reader. (Seriously, google only turns up references to this guy in relation to Orhan Pamuk, I am not at all sure he exists.)

I kind of suspect Pamuk's The New Life, which I didn't much like, is an attempt to rewrite Istanbul in novel form. Istanbul is still not my favorite of his books, but if you're going to read one or the other, read Istanbul.

I am beginning to suspect that the main reason that

schiarire decreed that we were in an Orhan Pamuk reading competition was to get me to read his essay compilation Other Colors. Having now read it, I cannot blame her! Other Colors is an amazing piece of writing.

The essays are on topics ranging from Pamuk's favorite authors to bits of Pamuk's life story to Turkish politics and national identity to Pamuk's own books, but separating them out like that is a bit unfair, because everything clearly infuses everything else. The prose is gorgeous and the ideas are fascinating. Bits that I suspect will stick with me best: the discussion of reading in the very first essay, which is when I first knew that I loved the book; the description of the earthquake in Istanbul, and what happened after; the comparisons of Russia's and Turkey's relationships with Europe; Pamuk's Nobel Prize essay, at the end, and the crazy intense passage on why he writes. I don't usually reread nonfiction, but I know that sooner or later, I will be reading this book.

(But Ji, I do not know how you managed to take from it the impression that Orhan Pamuk was cuddly.)

I would rank the Orhan Pamuk books I have read so far from most enjoyable to least: My Name is Red, Other Colors, The White Castle, The New Life, but from objectively best to least I might switch Other Colors and My Name is Red. Then again, I might not - My Name is Red is really good! Maybe it's best that I am not actually being asked to rank them.

I expected to love Orhan Pamuk's The New Life, given how much I enjoyed My Name is Red and The White Castle, and the fact that the plot summary I saw basically consisted of "a dude reads a book. It transforms his life and sends him on wild adventures as he tries to enter the world of the book!"

This is . . . not an inaccurate summary, exactly, but the novel itself has sort of a different slant. Our protagonist becomes obsessed with the mostly-undescribed book, and then, in short order, with The Girl who introduced him to the book and her ex-lover who introduced the book to her. They ride buses all night long in hopes of getting into a car crash and seeing a mysterious Angel alluded to in the book and have a series of allegorical and bizarre encounters with pro- and anti-book factions as our protagonist becomes increasingly unhinged. Embedded in the story is a philosophical debate about the current state of Turkey and the pros and cons of Westernization, which was really interesting, but I kept wanting to read a straight essay on the topic instead of this particular abstraction of it filtered through a character I wanted to hit over the head most of the time. (I am sorry, but I have close to zero tolerance these days for "I MUST POSSESS THIS MYSTERIOUS CIPHER OF A GIRL." And I know Orhan Pamuk can write interesting characters! But he is not really interested in writing characters here.)

In general, The New Life veers far too much towards abstract postmodernism for my taste - though I've had luck with Pamuk so far, I often have trouble with that style of writing at the best of times, and 'on a bus, after an incredibly hectic week' is probably not the best of times. (I am also not sure how great the translation was - phrases kept hitting me oddly, and I do not know if that was deliberate or the weirdness of the translation.) I don't anti-recommend it, and people with more brain than I had at the time for absorbing postmodernist allegory probably will enjoy it.

(Also, at least I have taken another step forward in the Orhan Pamuk reading competition that

schiarire and I are apparently having. Other Colours will be soon, Ji!)

Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle is a short, sparse book - I'm pretty it doesn't actually have any dialogue, and none of the characters are given proper names - about a seventeenth-century Italian who is captured and brought to Istanbul as a slave. After using his science knowledge to fake it as a doctor for a while, he earns the attention of some semi-powerful people and is given as a present to Hoja (used like a name, but it just means 'Master'), an intelligent and paranoid astrologer who wants to mine his brain for science knowledge and who also coincidentally looks eerily identical to the narrator, although for a while he pretends not to notice this. Hoja promises to free his slave once he's taught him "everything he knows," which in Hoja's terms basically means once he has achieved the scientific fame and glory he's looking for. Fairly soon, however, it becomes clear that science is not really going to get them very far, also that they are going to spend most of their lives hanging out with each other and basically nobody else, and also that Hoja and probably the narrator as well are kind of insane.

So of course that is when the CRAZY CREEPY MINDGAMES start.

Examples:

Hoja: I touch you! I touch you!
Narrator: What are you, twelve?
Hoja: Did I mention that I spent today shaking the hands of a large number of random people in our city, which is currently ridden with BUBONIC PLAGUE, and therefore I am probably highly contagious? :D
Narrator: AUGH WTF!
Hoja: Haha, you are such a coward! It must be so embarrassing for you to be afraid to die.

Narrator: I think you need to tell me all your faults.
Hoja: What faults?
Narrator: I know you have faults! Everyone has faults. You should write about them.
Narrator: And then I watched happily as he thought up new faults for himself every day and grew more and more miserable and convinced he was a horrible person!

The section of the book in the middle during the plague, as the mindgames come to a head and the identities of the two characters become more and more unnervingly inextricable, is definitely the strongest part of the novel. Everything else for me seemed sort of anticlimactic after that point, though the central questions about identity and self-creation and storytelling remain important and fascinating. One of my favorite parts is when the Sultan (who eventually becomes the third major character) has both characters in front of him, and starts trying to separate out their original identities - 'you said that, but it's a Hoja thing; Hoja did that, but he got it from you.'

But nothing beats the climax in the middle, when it's just two men locked in a house, and a mirror becomes more terrifying than the plague.

fahye recommended me Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red after being recced it herself by

copinggoggles; this is a distinguished recommendation lineage and thus I decided to pick it up! And in short: I pretty much loved it.

My Name is Red is told in a wide range of first-person perspectives that includes a peddlar, a murderer, a slew of artists, a coin, a horse, a color, and at least one corpse. Among others. The main plot involves the murder of a miniaturist, a top-secret possibly-blasphemous book project, and the courtship of a beautiful probably-widow, but the real drive of the story is the conflict between two different styles of art - Islamic book illumination and European-style portraiture - which I find incredibly interesting. The book constantly refers back to famous stories and anecdotes from Islamic literature and different ways of telling the same story or painting the same picture, the characters debate artistic concepts by telling each other stories about famous artists (when they are not murdering each other, of course) and it's all very meta and fascinating. I like literary thrillers because they make questions of art and storytelling exactly as exciting and dramatic and relevant to the characters as I feel they should be, and although this is not really a literary thriller exactly it does the same sort of thing and does it really well.

(My favorite part is probably when the head miniaturist manages to talk himself into the Sultan's Highly Guarded Treasury Library to look for a Stylistic Clue, and then pretty much hunkers down and refuses to leave because LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY BOOKS, while his co-investigator is like "UM YES THIS IS ALL VERY NICE BUT WHAT ABOUT CATCHING THE MURDERER?" And then there is a part that I found highly creepy and made me clutch at my eyes for a while, but anyways.)

I also loved getting to read a story set in fifteenth-century Istanbul that was not a European dude getting plunged into a zomg Foreign Culture, and I really appreciated the range of different viewpoints for that reason. One of the POV characters was even a Jewish peddler/matchmaker! Which was very exciting, and I loved the character and her voice despite being unpleasantly pinged by a few things (I do wish when there is only one Jewish character in a story that they would not focus quite so much on the Monetary Deviousness.)

There are also a one or two things I found out after I read the book that I am glad I did not know while I was reading it, and thus I will not mention them here, but in conclusion I am totally going to be hunting down more of Orhan Pamuk's books.